April 2023 — on making the network visible, organised, and not an embarrassment

Every home network starts the same way: a router from the ISP, a switch from a supermarket, a tangle of cables behind the television. It works. It’s not organised. It grows by accretion. At some point it becomes something you hide rather than show, and you stop understanding what’s actually connected to what.

December 2022 — on the difference between saying you can do something and having the git history to prove it

The first question any serious technical employer asks is: “Can I see something you’ve built?”

December 2022 — because PKI shouldn’t require a JIRA ticket and three approvals

There’s a version of certificate management that lives in large enterprises. You file a request. A team reviews it. Someone checks a compliance box. Five days later, a certificate lands in your inbox as a .pfx file. You paste it into a UI. Two weeks from now it expires and nobody notices until a monitoring alert fires at 2am.

February 2022 — on not accepting that “luxury sedan” and “ski trip” are mutually exclusive

The Audi A8 is not obviously a ski car. No roof rack options, no factory ski bag slot, seats that cost enough to make you nervous about wet gear. The commercial answer to this problem is “buy an estate” or “get a roof box,” neither of which I was prepared to accept without at least trying to solve it properly first.

November 2021 — on not ignoring what a gearbox is trying to tell you

It starts subtle. You’re lifting off the throttle coming out of a fast corner, already in second, and the lever just… moves. Not violently. Just a gentle migration toward neutral. You push it back. You wonder if you imagined it.

February 2021 — on the noise that comes from spinning rust and how to stop it from travelling

Every NAS build guide covers the same things: which board, which drives, which OS, how many watts. They cover RAID levels, ZFS recordsizes, network throughput. They benchmark transfer speeds and idle power.