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For context on how my brain works, see Working with an AuDHD Brain. Here is the smallest version of my entire productivity system: task add "Write the intro" +next task 1 start That is it. The task is recorded, the clock is running, and I can see both in under a second without touching a mouse. Everything else in this post builds on top of those two lines. The stack is taskwarrior for task management, timewarrior for time tracking, and vit as a vim-style interface on top. Keyboard-first, terminal-native, plain text on disk. ...

For a long time, the cloud was just the water I swam in. I provisioned managed Kubernetes, clicked through the console, pasted a Terraform module someone else wrote, and shipped. It worked. Billing landed every month, the dashboards stayed green, and I never once asked what was actually running underneath. I trusted it the way you trust a lift in a building. You press the button and the doors open. ...

For a long time I thought the problem was me. I have AuDHD: the combination of autism and ADHD. Specifically ADHD-PI, the inattentive variant, without the hyperactivity most people picture when they hear ADHD. For years I treated that as a defect to overcome. I bought the planners. I read the productivity books. I told myself that next Monday I’d finally be disciplined. This post is the story of how that approach failed, what I built instead, and why the systems I ended up depending on turn out to be good engineering for anyone. ...

As a kid I had a word for the things that fascinated me: unbreakable. Indestructible was never quite right, because indestructible means something that never breaks. Unbreakable is the better word. It means something that keeps working even after it breaks. I remember exactly when the fascination started. A photo of an A-10 Thunderbolt II that came back from a mission with half a wing gone, the tail in tatters, and the fuselage full of holes. That thing still brought its pilot home. ...

The first time someone asked me “was this slower last month than it is now?”, I had no answer. My Prometheus only remembered two weeks. The data I needed had already aged out of local disk and been deleted. That gap is the whole reason this post exists. Prometheus is the default for Kubernetes metrics, and for good reason. It works beautifully right up until you need long-term storage, or a view across multiple clusters, or genuine high availability. Then you meet the wall. ...