So You Wanna Be a Startup SRE? Read This First.

💡 Enterprise tech is laying people off. Startups are raising money. One of these wants you to fill out a form in Workday. The other needs you to ship working infra by Friday. Getting a job in the enterprise these days is like applying to be a cog in a machine

📦 A People’s History of Containers and Orchestration

From chroot to Kubernetes. From VMs to YAML manifestos. This is the story of how we learned to ship code without shipping our sanity. 🧱 Before the Container: The Age of the Monolith Beast Back in the day, you didn’t deploy an app. You deployed a server. Sometimes by shipping

👁 A People’s History of Monitoring and Observability

From Nagios checks and pager hell to high-cardinality tracing and human-centered debugging. This is how we learned to see. 🔔 It Started With a Ping Once upon a time, monitoring meant this: * Is the server up? * Is port 80 responding? * Is disk usage under 95%? That was it. You wrote some

🧬 A People’s History of Version Control

It started with chaos. Then came the logs. The merge wars. The broken diffs. The rise of Git. And now? We still don’t really know how rebase works. 📁 Chapter 0: "Save As v2 FINAL (REAL THIS TIME).doc" Before version control, you saved your files like a

🧾 A People’s History of Infrastructure as Code

From SSH into prod to Git-controlled clouds — how IaC rewired the way we build, break, and believe in infrastructure. 🧊 The Snowflake Server Era Before IaC, infra was a vibe. You’d SSH into prod, run a shell script, install a package, maybe forget what you did. No version control. No

🛠️ A People’s History of CI/CD

From Jenkins pipelines to GitHub Actions to AI-piloted deploys — how we got here, what we’ve learned, and what comes next. ☠️ Jenkins Will Outlive Us All Every DevOps engineer has had at least one tour of duty in Jenkins. Some of us never made it out. Born as Hudson in

🎭 How to Survive AI

Out-code the machines. Out-think the system. Outlive the hype. There’s a low hum in the tech world right now—an anxious buzz vibrating just below the surface. Layoffs. LLMs. Ghost code and ghost jobs. Everyone’s pretending they’re not scared. Let me say it straight: if you’re

DevOps Isn’t a Job Title — It’s a Philosophy

Back in 2009, John Allspaw and Paul Hammond got on stage at the Velocity Conference and dropped a bombshell: “10+ deploys a day.” They were talking about how Flickr—yes, that Flickr—was deploying software ten times a day without setting the building on fire. This was radical at the

🛠️ Cloud Engineering Is a Software Job

Why the best SREs write code like devs, not sysadmins You want to break into cloud engineering, platform, SRE, or DevOps? Cool. Learn to code. I don’t mean hacking together some Terraform modules you found on GitHub. I mean writing real code. Scripts, daemons, tests, CLI tools. Treating infrastructure

I Still Believe in the Internet

“The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.” — John Gilmore, 1993 💾 Jacked In (1998) I got the internet in 1998. A 400MHz Celeron processor inside an HP Pavilion, clunky as hell, but beautiful. Windows 98. 56k modem. AOL discs in the mailbox like manna from cyberspace. Within days,

Kubernetes Is Just a Kitchen (But With Fewer Knives and More YAML)

Let’s be honest: most Kubernetes explanations suck. They read like IKEA instructions for a nuclear reactor. Diagrams full of hexagons. Words like orchestrator, pod, and etcd, thrown around like everyone didn’t just Google them thirty seconds ago. So let’s start over. Let’s talk about Kubernetes like

When the System You Can’t Fix Is Yourself

The burnout no observability stack can catch — and no patch can solve. Some days I feel like a wizard at work. I’ll troubleshoot a broken deployment, unravel a race condition, optimize some gnarly Terraform module. I solve problems under pressure, wrangle ambiguity, bring order out of chaos — all before

🧠 Ctrl-Alt-Lang: How I Learn a New Programming Language

There are a million blog posts on how to "pick up" a new language. Most of them feel like they were written by someone who never shipped code at 3AM with PagerDuty breathing down their neck. This is how I do it — battle-tested, DevOps-brained, and tuned for curiosity

Rust for Pythonistas: Why I Dropped the Snake and Picked Up an Axe

I’ve written code in a lot of languages. ColdFusion, back when I didn’t know better. PHP when I needed a job. Ruby when I wanted to feel something. Go when I wanted things to work. A little Elixir for the poetry. Java when I had no choice. Python?

Write It Like You Mean It: Blazing-Fast Algorithmic APIs in Rust

Because Sometimes You Need a Knife, Not a Blender The problem with most APIs? They’re built like salad bars: slow, bloated, and full of shit nobody touches. Everything modular, everything abstract, everything wrapped in something else like a birthday gift you didn’t ask for. What we need is

I wish I'd kept a journal in 2014

But I was just too busy living my life. In early May of that year, I packed up what little I had in Roanoke, Virginia, and moved to New York City to start over. And somehow, it worked. I think back often to those first few weeks — bombing interviews, scribbling