DevOps

Here is how a lot of infrastructure still gets built in 2026. Someone opens a cloud console, clicks through a wizard, picks some defaults, and a resource appears. It works. The dashboard turns green. Everyone moves on. I can’t work that way. When I click a button and infrastructure appears, I feel like I borrowed it. I want to see what’s happening, I want the configuration written down where I can read it back, and I want to know why something exists instead of just that it exists. The console gives me a green checkmark. It doesn’t give me understanding. ...

Every platform team eventually asks the same question: should we build an Internal Developer Platform? The honest answer is usually yes. The part that wrecks teams is the how. I’ve watched platforms that cost a small fortune get shipped and then quietly abandoned because nobody wanted to use them. I’ve also seen a couple of Helm charts and a Kyverno policy change how a whole team ships software. The gap between those two outcomes has almost nothing to do with budget or which fashionable tool you picked. It comes down to whether you started by solving a real problem or by building the platform you imagined developers should want. ...

I keep getting asked which distro someone should run on their daily driver: Arch or NixOS. Usually by people who already run Linux and want a workstation they actually understand, not a black box that updates itself on someone else’s schedule. I’ve run both as my real machine. Not in VMs, not as a weekend experiment. As the laptop where I do professional DevOps and platform engineering work, and as the desktop where I do everything else. So let me state my bias up front, because this framework only works if I’m honest about it: I run Arch on both my desktops today, and I run NixOS on my servers. That tells you where I landed. But I landed there for specific reasons, and I want to walk through them rather than hand you a verdict. ...

A production server is misbehaving at 3 AM. You SSH in. Now what? The engineers who stay calm here are the ones who already know the next ten commands by heart, because they have run this exact loop a hundred times before, just with the word “flag” instead of “incident.” I spend my evenings doing Hack The Box challenges and CTF competitions. I have no plans to become a pentester. I like platform engineering. The reason I keep at it is that the skills carry straight into my day job, and the carryover is bigger than it sounds. ...

“We want to migrate to Kubernetes by November.” It was September. The client was an e-commerce company, and their biggest sales event of the year was Black Friday, in late November. I said no. They asked if I knew someone who might take it on anyway. I did. A fellow platform engineer, someone I respect and rate highly. I made the introduction but warned him about the timeline. He took the engagement, documented the same concerns I had, got them signed off. The client proceeded anyway. ...