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Reliability
Incidents, alerts, on-call, and the slow work of making production uneventful. Most of these start from something that broke and the decision that let it.
Notes on Reliability
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13 Oct 2026 Reliability The Alarm That Couldn’t Ring Four checks reported healthy while doing nothing. A green light tells you a check has nothing to report, and a broken check has nothing to report either. -
25 Sep 2026 Systems The Archaeology of Someone Else’s Decisions A legacy product isn’t a mess waiting for good taste. It’s a record of decisions that are mostly still correct, made by people who are gone, for reasons nobody wrote down. -
15 Sep 2026 Leadership The Slot Machine With Better Graphics AI made failing free. It did nothing for learning, and the two were never the same thing — "fail fast" only ever worked because the fast was in service of the learning, not a virtue on its own. -
03 Jul 2026 Leadership Accountability Was Never the Computer’s Job When something an AI helped build goes wrong, the tool makes an easy scapegoat. It cannot hold the blame — and pretending it can is how teams stop learning. -
19 Jun 2026 AI The Cheapest Code Is the One You Never Write AI made building almost free. It left the cost of owning what you build exactly where it was. -
15 Jun 2026 AI AI Is About to Make Engineering Discipline Mainstream For a decade, rigor was a luxury only the best teams could justify. AI just made it the price of admission. -
13 Jun 2026 Leadership Confidence Is Not Competence AI gives a functional expert the power to ship and the confidence to do it. It can’t give them the years that teach you what code does when no one is watching. -
07 May 2026 Systems The Cost of a Clean Abstraction Every model hides the thing it was built to hide — and that’s exactly where the outage lives. -
21 Apr 2026 AI AI Amplifies Discipline, It Doesn’t Replace It The 25% velocity gain came from the gates we kept, not the tools we adopted. -
12 Feb 2026 Reliability Predictable Beats Heroic Two years spent making reliability uneventful — and the quiet things that cost.
From the desk
Keep the argument going?
This desk is where the engineering and the fiction argue it out. If a line here stuck with you — or you’d take the other side — I’d genuinely like to hear it.