Blog Archive

You're Not Writing Code. You're Running a System.

The most important change an engineer can make isn't a new language or framework — it's a single sentence about what they think they're doing. 'I am writing code' makes the diff the deliverable and production someone else's problem. 'I am running a system' makes the live behavior the deliverable and the merge the starting line. Same keyboard, same person, a completely different job — and nearly everything good downstream flows from the switch.

Maintainability Against the Unknown Unknowns

You can harden a system against the failures you can imagine. You cannot harden it against the ones you can't — and those are the ones that take you down. The only defense against a failure you never predicted is a system you can understand, change, and recover fast enough to survive the surprise. That capacity has a name: maintainability. It's the most undervalued property in engineering, because its payoff is invisible until the day it's everything.

Manual, Automated, Autonomous

There are three rungs on the operations ladder — do it by hand, run a script that does it, or build a system that keeps it done without you. Most teams climb to the middle rung, call it 'automated,' and stop — never realizing the rung above is where reliability actually lives. The Google SRE book laid this out a decade ago. It's the most-cited, least-applied book in the field.

The Balanced Org

Separate offense (product, engineering, sales) from defense (infrastructure, IT, security, compliance), hold them as peers in dynamic tension under the CEO, and put the right temperament in every seat. A visual essay on org design — and why no single 'balanced' leader can hold both halves of the job at once.

The Digital Plumber

Ask an SRE what they do and you'll get a hundred answers. Here's mine: we wear three hats — advisor, plumber, and firefighter — and not one of them is 'product.' We are the people who make sure the product can be built cheaply, shipped reliably, and kept alive at 3 a.m., whatever the product happens to be. Because after enough years, you stop seeing products at all. You just see systems, and bytes moving through them.

Chasing Nines

Your availability target — how many nines you promise — isn't a line in a contract, it's an architecture decision. Get it wrong in one direction and you fail the SLA you sold. Get it wrong in the other and you burn money buying nines you never promised. I once looked at a stack paying $10,000 a month for high availability it did not actually have.

Writing for Generation Ships

The best professional compliment I ever got was that I should be writing code for generation ships flying to Alpha Centauri. It came from someone who spent years defending a system I built, against people actively trying to destroy it, armed with nothing but links to my code and documentation. I was not there. That is the whole point.

'Production Ready' Is a Hand-Off, Not a Launch

The moment you hand a service to the people who run production, 'it works' stops meaning 'it works on my machine' and starts meaning 'someone who has never seen this code can keep it alive at 3 a.m.' Production readiness is that hand-off contract — and almost every item on the checklist traces back to one question: what does the on-call engineer need to survive the night?