Networks, cloud platforms, monitoring, and the foundational systems that determine whether digital services scale or collapse.
Welcome to the engine room of digital operations, where uptime is religion and redundancy is scripture. From DNS and networking to cloud architecture, performance tuning, and observability, these infrastructure stories reveal the hidden complexity behind seemingly simple services—load balancers that saved the day, SLA maths that humbled the confident, and database migrations that nearly didn't.
architecture (5)
System design principles and architectural patterns that shape resilient, maintainable software solutions.automation (6)
Systematic approaches to eliminating repetitive tasks through scripting, version control workflows, and intelligent tooling.configuration (5)
Configuration management strategies that bring order to chaos across development environments and production systems.devops (6)
Containers, reproducible environments, and operational practices bridging the gap between development agility and production stability.industry (2)
Workforce trends, market shifts, and systemic forces reshaping who builds software and how the profession evolves.infrastructure (6)
Networks, cloud platforms, monitoring, and the foundational systems that determine whether digital services scale or collapse.patterns (6)
Design patterns and anti-patterns that separate maintainable codebases from technical debt graveyards.productivity (7)
Workflow optimisations, terminal mastery, and tool choices that multiply developer effectiveness without sacrificing code quality.quality (12)
Software quality principles—from debugging and testing to the practices that distinguish robust systems from those held together by hope.security (5)
Security engineering, credential management, and the defensive practices that protect systems from threats both obvious and obscure.ssh (4)
Secure shell mastery and remote access patterns that turn distributed systems into a unified workspace.standards (7)
Coding standards, process conventions, and the governance practices that transform individual preferences into collective consistency.
The microservices tax: when distributed systems cost more than the problems they solve
The industry adopted microservices as the default architecture for modern systems, but the tax is coming due. When the company that helped popularise distributed services publishes a 90% cost reduction by returning to a monolith, the assumption deserves reexamination.
AWS sub-accounts: isolating resources with Organizations
Most teams dump client resources into their main AWS account, creating an administrative nightmare when projects end or security issues arise. AWS Organizations sub-accounts provide hard security boundaries that separate resources, limit blast radius from incidents, and make cleanup trivial—yet many developers avoid them, assuming the setup complexity outweighs the benefits.
The 2038 problem: when time runs out
At exactly 03:14:07 UTC on January 19, 2038, a significant portion of the world's computing infrastructure will experience temporal catastrophe. Unlike Y2K, this isn't a formatting problem - it's mathematics meets physics, and we can't patch the fundamental laws of binary arithmetic.
Turbocharge development: the magic of SSH port forwarding
Security policies block database ports. Firewalls prevent external connections. Remote services remain inaccessible except through carefully controlled channels. SSH port forwarding creates encrypted tunnels that make distant services appear local—you connect to localhost whilst traffic routes securely to remote resources, maintaining security boundaries without compromising workflow efficiency.
Streamlining local development with Dnsmasq
Testing on localhost hides entire categories of bugs—cookie scope issues, CORS policies, authentication flows that behave differently on real domains. These problems surface after deployment, when fixing them costs hours instead of minutes. Dnsmasq eliminates this gap by making local development behave like production, turning any custom domain into localhost whilst preserving domain-based security policies.
Downtime of uptime percentages, deciphering the impact
Understanding the real-world implications of uptime percentages is paramount for businesses and consumers alike. What might seem like minor decimal differences in uptime guarantees can translate to significant variations in service availability, impacting operations, customer experience, and bottom lines.