Writing
Notes from the operations floor
Field notes on running systems and the people who depend on them: what broke, what I built, and what I'd do differently. Written for operators, not marketers.
How to check whether a Python package is malicious
A backdoored LiteLLM release shipped a credential stealer in site-packages. The checks I run before and after installing a dependency.
Alert severity that people actually respect
Most alerting systems have too many levels and no owners. The four-tier severity model I use, with ack windows and escalation timers.
Monitoring a homelab you cannot always reach
Silent failures cost the most. What to watch in a remote lab, what to ignore, and the outside-in heartbeat that catches a dead monitoring host.
What a $0 home lab taught me about enterprise ops
Break things on purpose so production stays boring: the cost discipline, failure modes, and transferable lessons of running a lab on leftovers.
From Apple Genius to building AI ops tooling
Explaining tech to humans in 2014 turned out to be the same skill as building systems that explain themselves in 2026.
Why I open-source my monitoring tools
Abandoned tools, fake claims, and why MIT with an honest README beats marketing. What open source actually gets you when nobody is watching.
How I cut incident response from hours to minutes
What happened when I rebuilt monitoring and alerting across a multi-site manufacturing operation, and the lessons that apply to any ops team.
Backporting modern health monitoring onto 2016-era servers
How rackpulse gives old Dell PowerEdge gear on ESXi 6.7 the monitoring modern hardware takes for granted.
Running an AI-assisted ops stack on a near-zero budget
The three tools that talk to each other beat the eight-tool stack. Here's the stack my job hunt and my lab run on.
The solar-powered lab that simulates a data center
A 40GbE backbone, ESXi and Kubernetes, whole-home automation, and why a home lab is the best interview prep I know.