These are public notes on backend engineering, infrastructure, reliability, AI systems, and the craft of writing operational knowledge.
This garden is intentionally curated. My private vault contains working notes, raw source material, client context, and personal records. The notes here are rewritten for public reading.
If you’re new, start here
- Cloudflare Mesh vs Tunnel — the one I get asked about most
- A Knowledge Base Should Push Back — why this is more than an archive
- A Three-Layer Pattern for AI-Maintained Notes — how this garden is maintained
- Failure-Mode Thinking as a Design Discipline — the engineering habit underneath the reliability notes
- The Cost of Being Always Available — on responsiveness, judgment, and boundaries
- Reading a Tech Hiring Pipeline From the Outside — for engineers job-searching
About
Posts
First-person essays, opinion pieces, and dated reflections. Recent first.
- 2026-05-08 — A Knowledge Base Should Push Back
- 2026-04-30 — The Wait
- 2026-04-15 — Atrial Fibrillation at 26
- 2026-03-22 — Reading a Tech Hiring Pipeline From the Outside
- 2026-02-18 — Support Engineering as Production Engineering
- 2026-01-25 — A Three-Layer Pattern for AI-Maintained Notes
- 2025-04-12 — How I Write Operational Notes
- 2025-01-18 — The Cost of Being Always Available
- 2024-12-04 — Smart Is Good. Kind Is Better in Incident Response
- 2024-11-15 — A Postmortem for Myself: How I Recover After a Bad Week
- 2024-10-08 — Feeling of Importance at Work (Without Ego Games)
- 2024-09-22 — Building a Personal Homelab Without Burning Out
- 2024-08-14 — Financial Independence for Engineers in Emerging Markets
Thoughts
Reference-shaped notes on concepts, patterns, and tools. The thesis tends to stay stable as I revise the surrounding text.
- Agent Access Should Be Narrower Than Human Access
- Agent Memory Is Retrieval Policy, Not Storage
- Cloudflare Mesh vs Tunnel
- Containerizing Serverless Workloads
- Failure-Mode Thinking as a Design Discipline
- GitOps Is a Recovery Pattern
- LLM Maintained Knowledge Bases Need Boundaries
- Mesh VPNs Are Access Paths, Not Authorization
- Migration Checklists Should Start With Rollback
- Production Readiness Is a Set of Invariants
- Runbooks Are Interfaces
- Small Team Infrastructure Decisions
- System of Record vs Agent Layer
- What RAG Actually Solves (and What It Doesn’t)