Opinion
An AI Agent Cannot Debug a System You Cannot Describe
The agent read the whole repository and still could not find the bug, because the bug was the gap between what the code does and what it was supposed to do…
Opinion
Blameless Postmortems Went Too Far in the Other Direction
Removing blame from incident reviews also removed accountability, and now the same decision recurs quarterly with a new author.
DevOps
Six Months of Running MicroVMs in Production
What broke, what surprised me, and what I would tell someone considering Firecracker for their own platform.
Opinion
Technical Debt Is the Wrong Metaphor
Debt implies a known principal, a rate and a repayment plan. Most of what we call technical debt is none of those.
Opinion
Code Coverage Tells You What Ran, Not What Was Checked
Coverage counts executed lines, and a test can execute a branch while asserting nothing about it. The number rises while the protection stays flat, which is…
Opinion
The People Who Designed It Should Be on the Pager
Escalation paths that route incidents away from senior engineers also route the feedback away from the people who can fix the design.
Opinion
Nobody Looks at Your Dashboard Until Something Is Already Broken
Dashboards are built for demos and read during incidents, which is the one moment they cannot help. Monitoring that is only useful after the fact is…
Opinion
Most of Your Microservices Should Be Modules
A network call is a thousand times slower than a function call and a hundred times harder to debug. Most service boundaries were drawn for organisational…
Opinion
Observability Platforms Sold You a Very Expensive Search Box
Ingesting everything is not observability. Most platforms give you a fast grep over a huge bill, and the ability to answer a question you did not know to…
AI
A Year of Debugging AI Generated Code
Twelve months of daily agent use, reviewed honestly. The failure modes that got better, the ones that did not, and the practices that stuck.
DevOps
A Canary Deployment That Shipped a Broken Release Anyway
The canary looked healthy the entire time it was serving errors to real users. Five percent of traffic is not a sample, it is a rounding error, and your…
Opinion
A Test That Restates the Implementation Is Not a Test
Some tests fail every time the code changes shape and pass every time it breaks. They are not guarding behaviour, they are guarding the current arrangement…