The dismissal
2026.086Three checks and the developer assumes the fourth is covered. That gap is where the damage hides.
Ops
2026
Trust boundaries
2026.079Your code already leaves the machine. The agent just gave it another surface.
The personal agent trap
2026.059A week in the agent ecosystem. Routing layers with an LLM attached, not development partners.
2020
When the aquarium went dark
2020.228The checklist ports to Slack. The hazard lights are still wired. Nobody filed the ticket.
2019
Prescaling for a known spike
2019.074Autoscale never helped in the time of crisis. What helped was prescaling -- capacity ready before the traffic arrives.
2018
A week before the sale
2018.154The checklist is the same as last year. That's the point.
2017
Hazard lights
2017.161We wired physical lights to 5xx alerts. It changed how the team reacts to production issues.
Nginx load balancing decisions
2017.138Algorithm selection, passive health checking, per-endpoint rate limiting, and upstream timing -- the decisions that matter when Nginx sits in front of production traffic.
2013
Zero-downtime deploys
2013.196A bash deploy script and a Node.js process monitor -- SSH, pull, touch a file, the cluster reloads. No CI, no dashboard. The terminal.
Running Node.js in production
2013.149Upstart, clustering, zero-downtime deploys, heartbeat monitoring, and an embedded REPL -- what it takes to keep Node.js running in production in 2013.
MySQL on XFS
2013.101Using bind mounts to move MySQL data, config, and logs to an XFS volume without changing a single MySQL setting.
2012
The host came back, nginx didn't
2012.290Some paths proxy to another host. It went down, came back -- and nginx kept failing until I reloaded it.