The unglamorous work that keeps everything running: operations discipline, monitoring, maintenance windows, and the daily practice behind systems that don’t fail, from a career running them.
InfrastructureSeptember 1, 2026
A hard constraint will hand you a solution you would never have picked from a list of options, and the solution is often better than what you would have chosen freely. We had a floor tile buckling under a live…
Disaster RecoverySeptember 1, 2026
When a vendor has been working on your problem for a week without a theory, that is your signal to bring in somebody else. One firm spent a week on a slowdown that had stopped our business. A second firm…
Disaster RecoverySeptember 1, 2026
A tested system and a proven system are different things, and most companies say covered when they mean tested. I built a disaster recovery site over several years with no budget and no headcount, tested it regularly, and never once…
IT OperationsSeptember 1, 2026
If you are the person who gets called every time something breaks, the problem is not your availability. The escalation logic lives in your head and nowhere else, so every call has to reach you. Writing that logic down on…
IT OperationsSeptember 1, 2026
The valuable half of an on-call schedule is the part where you are not on it, and that half only exists if the boundary is real.
Digital TransformationSeptember 1, 2026
Modernization gets sold as an opportunity and it almost never arrives as one. It arrives as a bill, when a vendor stops supporting something or a platform can no longer be upgraded.
InfrastructureSeptember 1, 2026
Before you fund a project to modernize an aging system, find out whether the failures are coming from the software or from the hardware underneath it. We had an old system breaking constantly and running slow. Nobody rewrote a line…
IT OperationsSeptember 1, 2026
The first time you outsource a capability is usually the last decision you get to make about it. I built a private cloud, my team had no hours to learn the technology, so I hired a firm to run it.
HiringSeptember 1, 2026
The best hire I made in thirty-three years produced no story. The resume was accurate, the interview matched it, the background matched the interview, and the work matched all three.
AISeptember 1, 2026
Before you buy AI-branded anomaly detection, ask the vendor one question: what does it compute? If the answer is a baseline and a deviation from that baseline, you are buying a method that has worked since long before anyone put…
IT OperationsSeptember 1, 2026
Software that keeps customer rules in code has a ceiling, and you find the ceiling at the worst possible time. Software that keeps them in a table has no ceiling at all.
AIAugust 26, 2026
One question will tell you whether your AI agent project is going to work, and it takes an afternoon to answer. The question is not what the agent can do. It is what the agent is allowed to do when…
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