The personal agent trap
A week in the agent ecosystem. Routing layers with an LLM attached, not development partners.
Infrastructure
tag:
infrastructure
all tags →2026
2021
Evidence
The debate ended when the PM pulled up a graph.
PostgreSQL HA
Streaming replication, automated failover, and the operational lessons that aren't in the PostgreSQL docs -- split-brain, silent lag, and why DR drills matter more than DR plans.
2019
Prescaling for a known spike
Autoscale never helped in the time of crisis. What helped was prescaling -- capacity ready before the traffic arrives.
2018
Consul in practice
Service discovery, health checks, and dynamic config across a growing fleet of microservices -- and the moment KV store got too popular.
The week pgbouncer stopped being news
Transaction pooling, one SET that didn't stick, and a standup that moved on.
The GraphQL buffer
A GraphQL gateway that started as a unified API layer for clients became the place where we could intervene without touching the backends.
2017
Hazard lights
We wired physical lights to 5xx alerts. It changed how the team reacts to production issues.
Nginx load balancing decisions
Algorithm selection, passive health checking, per-endpoint rate limiting, and upstream timing -- the decisions that matter when Nginx sits in front of production traffic.
2014
Node.js on a Raspberry Pi
Running a custom Node.js blog engine on a Raspberry Pi at home -- from a 45-day wait and a dead board to DuckDNS, ISP port blocking, and the first external request.
2013
Running Node.js in production
Upstart, clustering, zero-downtime deploys, heartbeat monitoring, and an embedded REPL -- what it takes to keep Node.js running in production in 2013.
MySQL on XFS
Using bind mounts to move MySQL data, config, and logs to an XFS volume without changing a single MySQL setting.