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November 12, 2026 · Operations
Busy is not a deliverable
Software copied the Green Beret team of specialists and skipped its most important rule: one mission at a time. Why concurrent projects on a shared stack burn out operations teams, and how to run your next production change like a mission.
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October 30, 2026 · Hiring
How to interview a Staff SRE when nobody on your panel is one
The interview round I ran most at Slack, written up so you can run it yourself: one system, five questions, and the signals that separate running a system from sitting next to it.
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October 27, 2026 · Open source
A dropped SSH session is not a dead roll
I audited hammerdown against the worst way a rolling restart can fail. It found three brakes I'd left off.
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October 23, 2026 · Open source
hammerdown: rolling 11,000 database nodes from a terminal, with the brakes on
From Oracle's adpatch to an 11,000-node Vitess fleet: the multi-worker CLI control plane I keep rebuilding, now open source.
HASHJOIN Field Notes
New tools and field notes on running production fleets: rolling upgrades, incident forensics, and Claude-augmented ops. About once a month, no spam. Prefer a reader? Atom feed.