The dismissal
Three checks and the developer assumes the fourth is covered. That gap is where the damage hides.
Ops
2026
Trust boundaries
Your code already leaves the machine. The agent just gave it another surface.
The personal agent trap
A week in the agent ecosystem. Routing layers with an LLM attached, not development partners.
2019
Prescaling for a known spike
Autoscale never helped in the time of crisis. What helped was prescaling -- capacity ready before the traffic arrives.
2017
Hazard lights
We wired physical lights to 5xx alerts. It changed how the team reacts to production issues.
Nginx load balancing decisions
Algorithm 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
A 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
Upstart, 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
Using bind mounts to move MySQL data, config, and logs to an XFS volume without changing a single MySQL setting.