Notes on data, AI, IT
and security
No marketing fog. The way I think about real problems with founders and managers.
When the provider is the incident: hybrid infrastructure and somebody else's maintenance
Azure had an infrastructure incident that hit hybrid scenarios, VPN and cloud VMware services. According to The Register, the trouble came out of internal maintenance work. Why this is the nastiest class of outage to own, and what actually helps.
The coding agent gets its own environment: rights, review and the bill
OpenAI added reusable cloud development environments to Codex. A coding agent stops being autocomplete in an editor and becomes a participant in the pipeline with its own access. What changes in credentials, secrets, repository history, and who answers for the code it writes.
Kubernetes for AI agents: when always-on agents need a control plane
OpenClaw Enterprise is being built as an open-source control plane for always-on AI agents, with OpenAI, NVIDIA and Red Hat involved. What the AgentOps layer actually solves, who needs it today, who does not, and the signals that tell you it is time.
"We have a niche stack - have you worked with it?" How I take on unfamiliar technology
A direct answer to the client's real fear: paying my rate while my engineers google your technology. What I actually sell, and how I ramp on an unfamiliar or legacy system.
Experience in IT doesn't appreciate on its own
The market pays not for years in the profession but for the ability to solve current problems. Why expertise quietly loses value, and which part of it barely depreciates at all.
Excel in a company is not a shame, it is a symptom of growth
Why a company being held together by Excel is not embarrassing, but a signal of which processes have outgrown their tools.
Simple architecture often beats trendy
How the urge to use the right stack and draw beautiful diagrams quietly breaks projects that could have been running calmly for years.
Internal API governance: why you need it when you have more than three teams
When a company grows to several product teams, internal integrations start creating problems. Why this happens and how to work with it.
IT budget after a growth freeze: what to cut, what to protect
How to set priorities in an IT budget when the company shifts from growth mode to caution.
Platform engineering: from ops team to internal product
Platform engineering is not just a new word for DevOps. It is a shift in how the infrastructure team thinks about its work - and who its customer is.
Managing internal APIs as teams scale
When a five-person team grows to fifty, informal API agreements stop working. What to put in place before it starts to hurt.
IT budget without transparency: why the numbers diverge from reality
How companies lose control of IT spending, and what it takes for the budget to reflect what is actually happening.