Posts

Since the cost and effort required to create video has been dramatically decreasing over the last few years I’ve been using it more and more to explain system architectures. To show the impact it can have I took some time to document my hobby project - https://marketfinder.us. The way it harvests the data (pun fully intended) is interesting, and has lots of checkpoints and observation opportunities that make this type of system something I can operate solo. ...

Recently I caught up with a colleague who was one of the best developers I’ve ever worked with. They were also the hardest person to promote. The CTO’s pushback to my request came in one sentence: “They were never in the war room.” The CTO wasn’t wrong about the facts. They were never in the war room, because their systems never warranted one. Everything they shipped was resilient against the failure modes we had, documented well enough that other teams and users could answer their own questions, and boring in the way that well executed systems are boring. On top of that, culturally, they made the people around them better, quietly, without ever boasting about it. ...

That’s Slonik up there in the storyboard image, a friendly PostgreSQL elephant sitting behind a desk under a neon “OPEN FOR BUSINESS” sign, watching a line of AKS (Azure Kubernetes Service) shipping containers wait their turn at the door. He was going to star in a video about Azure Private Link. He had a co-star, too: Ricky the Raccoon, our hacker, who shows up first in a hard hat with a jackhammer, then in a top hat and monocle, and finally in a fedora and trench coat where he’s figured out how to spin up his own Azure VM and walk straight in through the “Allow public access from any Azure service” checkbox. There was a circus tent, somewhere in Act 2, representing the entirety of Azure’s customer base flooding through that checkbox like a carnival. ...

I spent many hours over the holiday break wrestling with Docker path mappings on my homelab server. Multiple open source apps, each expecting files in slightly different locations. Mount points that worked for one broke another. Environment variables that I had to continually down and up the stack to test. So I did what we all do now: I asked an AI. Ten minutes later, I had it all working. Problem solved. ...

I’ve watched talented engineering teams burn out not from working too hard, but from working without direction. The pattern is always the same: leadership announces a new strategic pivot every quarter, teams scramble to adjust, morale craters, and your best people start updating their LinkedIn profiles. The problem isn’t the changes themselves. It’s that without a guiding vision, every shift feels like a complete reversal rather than a necessary course correction. ...