Now

The Mechanic — Sat, 09 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Working on</h2>

`patch-pilot</code> — the scoring model for dependency prioritization needs rework after I found edge cases where patch-level bumps in core networking libs were getting scored too low</li>`
`This site — finally making it public after three months of "I'll add one more thing first"</li>`
A write-up on the incident from last month where a misconfigured readiness probe caused a cascading failure across three services; still collecting notes</li> </ul> Reading</h2> The Pragmatic Programmer</em> for the third time — different things land at different points in a career</li> The Cilium documentation, specifically the eBPF datapath section, because I still don't fully trust what I haven't read</li> </ul> Paying attention to</h2> The gap between what observability tooling promises and what it actually delivers in a four-person ops team with real budget constraints. Not everything needs a distributed trace; sometimes you just need a log that says what actually happened.</p> Also: whether patch-pilot</code> should grow a web UI or stay a pure CLI tool. Leaning toward CLI-only and a good JSON output format that other tools can consume.</p> Not working on</h2> Rewrites. I have three half-finished rewrites of old projects that I keep convincing myself are "almost done." They're not. Freezing them until the active projects ship.</p> Last updated: May 2026</em></p>

Hello World

The Mechanic — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Every site starts with a hello-world. Mine is no different, except I've been dreading writing it for about three months.</p>

I'm the kind of person who builds things to avoid talking about the things I build. I spent two weekends writing a custom log parser before I admitted I could have used jq</code>. I have four half-finished Kubernetes operators in various states of decay. I once rewrote a 40-line bash script in Go because I thought it would be "more maintainable" — it was not more maintainable.</p>

That's the honest picture. I'm a mechanic, not an architect. I fix things, I build things, I break things, and occasionally I build something that actually holds up under real pressure.</p>

What this site is</h2> This is a place for notes. Not tutorials with seven diagrams and an affiliate disclaimer. Not a "deep dive" that turns out to be three paragraphs and a table of contents. Just notes — the kind of thing I'd send to a colleague who asked "how does that work?" or "why did you do it that way?"</p> Some posts will be long. Most will be short. A few will be wrong, and I'll update them when I figure that out. I've got a now page for what I'm currently working on, a projects section for things that survived contact with production, and a blog for everything else.</p> What I actually do</h2> I work on infrastructure and platform tooling. Clusters, pipelines, deployments, monitoring — the layer below the application that everyone forgets about until it breaks at 2am. I've been doing some version of this for about eight years, which means I've been paged at 2am for about eight years.</p> I started out as a sysadmin who learned to write scripts because I was tired of doing the same thing twice. Then the scripts became services. Then the services became platforms. Somewhere in there I started calling myself a software engineer, though I still think of the work as closer to plumbing than artistry.</p> Why now</h2> I've been collecting notes in private notebooks for years — Obsidian vaults, text files, random gists. I keep finding the same patterns: a debugging technique I rediscovered, a tool I forgot I liked, a lesson I had to re-learn. Writing things in public is partly a forcing function for clarity, and partly a way to stop losing the same hour to the same problem.</p> If something here helps you, that's a bonus. The primary reader is me-in-six-months who has definitely forgotten how this worked.</p> Welcome to the shop.</p>