Notes
Short write-ups from real systems, documenting decisions, trade-offs, and what I would do differently next time.
August 2026
You described a business problem. The proposal that came back is full of words you don't recognise and a price that surprised you. Here is how to read it.
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July 2026
The evasive answer is 'it depends.' The dishonest answer is a number designed to get you to the next meeting. Here is what actually drives the cost of custom software, and what you should expect to pay.
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July 2026
Spreadsheets are powerful tools. They become a problem when they're used as the operational backbone of a business they were never built to support.
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July 2026
Most businesses don't choose their software deliberately. Here are the signs that what you're running has stopped fitting the shape of how your business actually works.
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July 2026
The Terraform-to-Ansible contract I designed on my homelab is the same contract I deploy at work with Azure Verified Modules. The pattern transfers; only the providers change.
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July 2026
How a £0 infrastructure budget forced architectural decisions that map directly to cloud cost governance, and what FinOps looks like when you can't just throw money at the problem.
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June 2026
The decision to withhold advanced AI models from general access isn't a sudden shift. It is the continuation of a tension that has been building for years across the technology landscape.
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June 2026
Scoped CI/CD secrets, Prometheus and Grafana on k3s, and four alert rules routed by audience and urgency: how a self-hosted platform limits blast radius without an SRE team to page.
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February 2026
The roles declared in Terraform were designed to feed Ansible. Ansible was built to stand up k3s. This is how a three-node cluster assembles itself from a single playbook run.
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February 2026
I automated forgetting how to create VMs. A shift from manual provisioning to declarative, role-based platform thinking on Proxmox.
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