Notes
Working notes, arguments, experiments, field reports, and the occasional thing that started as “this will take twenty minutes.”
High-signal
4 surfacedField Note: Credit Cards Expire, Which Also Impacts Your Domain
A credit card expiration briefly took the domain offline and added an avoidable plot twist to an already busy month.
The Agents Are Rogue
The reported Hugging Face agent hack is a useful reminder that autonomous can be a very polished word for unsupervised.
The Button Was Fine. CSP Had Other Plans.
A production CSP blocked Next.js hydration, leaving a perfectly rendered button with nothing useful to do.
Why Your Retry Logic Is Lying to You
Exponential backoff is not a personality trait. Most retry logic just hides a design problem with more patience.
Series
The Button Was Fine. CSP Had Other Plans.
2026.09.12A production CSP blocked Next.js hydration, leaving a perfectly rendered button with nothing useful to do.
featuredSecurityDeveloper toolingtechnicalweb-securitycspnextjsThe Agents Are Rogue
2026.09.11The reported Hugging Face agent hack is a useful reminder that autonomous can be a very polished word for unsupervised.
featuredAISecurityopinionaisecurityagentsYour Cloud Bill Is a Design Review in Disguise
2026.09.10The invoice is only the visible part. The rest of the bill arrives as latency, operational effort, and systems that become very interesting under load.
Systems in PracticeCloudArchitecturetechnicalcloudarchitecturecostField Note: Credit Cards Expire, Which Also Impacts Your Domain
2026.09.02A credit card expiration briefly took the domain offline and added an avoidable plot twist to an already busy month.
featuredfield-notechaosdomain-woesdolla-dolla-bills-yallField Note: The Possum Incident
2026.09.02A possum was sighted, which would be ordinary if I did not already have a history of unexpected apartment wildlife.
field-notewildlifelifeRevision: Rewriting the Ingest Collector
2026.07.30Diff notes on polling versus event-driven ingest, with the operational tradeoffs made explicit.
Systems in PracticeCloudArchitecturerevisiondistributed-systemsarchitectureWhy Your Retry Logic Is Lying to You
2026.07.19Exponential backoff is not a personality trait. Most retry logic just hides a design problem with more patience.
featuredSystems in PracticeReliabilitytechnicaldistributed-systemsreliabilityThe Diagram Nobody Asked For
2026.07.12I drew an architecture diagram for a system with four components. It somehow needed three revisions.
Systems in PracticeCloudArchitecturebuild-logarchitecturedocumentationOpinions on Microservices Nobody Asked For
2026.07.05Microservices didn't fix your org chart. They just gave the org chart a network boundary.
Systems in PracticeArchitectureopinionarchitectureorg-designArchive: The First Version of This Site
2026.07.01An earlier draft of this site tried to be a SaaS landing page. It has been retired, with dignity.
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