Writing

A renamed resource block, a plan I skimmed instead of read, and a database that came within one apply of being destroyed and recreated. What actually went wrong, and the two guardrails that would have caught it.

Spreadsheets and WhatsApp weren't the real problem — the workflow they were badly approximating was. Notes on mapping a business's actual process before writing a single line of schema.

AI agents write infra scripts that work perfectly the first time and misbehave the second. A concrete check for the one property that matters most and is checked least.

Rebuilding this site from a self-hosted Ghost blog into a static Astro site on Cloudflare Pages — the phased build, the conversion script, and the redirect map that kept old links working.

An audit of every managed-service line item on my monthly bill, what each one was actually buying me, and what replaced it once I stopped assuming 'managed' meant 'necessary.'

The architecture behind a four-node self-hosted setup: a private mesh network, a control plane for deploys, and public ingress without opening a single inbound port.

AWS ships a feature before the Terraform provider catches up more often than the docs let on. Here's the terraform_data plus boto3 pattern I use to keep state and idempotency instead of reaching for a null_resource hack.

A working rule for when to let an AI agent drive and when to take the wheel yourself, based on reversibility and blast radius rather than a blanket policy of trust or distrust.