The Dispatch
Career development, education, and the systems behind getting better. · View all
The Infiltrator Surprise: A Septic Tank Story
Our contractor came out expecting a corrugated system. What he found was an infiltrator setup nobody documented. We all learned something that day, and it reminded me why documentation matters everywhere.
Observability at Work and at Home: The Case for Early Intervention
The same principle applies everywhere: if you wait until the system is on fire to start looking at metrics, you've already lost. Early signals exist. You just have to be watching.
Growing Engineers: The Long Game of People Development
The best infrastructure I've ever built isn't a server cluster or an automation framework. It's a team of engineers who can make decisions I'd trust without being in the room.
Blast Radius: Why Infrastructure Teams Build Tools
Infrastructure teams build tools because their blast radius is enormous. When your work touches every application in the organization, the leverage of a good tool (or the damage of a bad one) scales differently than it does for an application team.
Keep Your Hobbies Unmonetized
The moment you start thinking about ROI on a hobby, you've turned something you love into something you owe. I've watched it happen with photography, copywriting, and smoking meat, and the pattern is always the same.
Accepted: Gies iMBA at University of Illinois
Wanted to share that I've been accepted into the Gies College of Business iMBA program at University of Illinois for the fall 2026 term.
Incident Response at Home
In the datacenter, when a server goes down, we don't scream at the hardware. We look for the root cause. Why should a meltdown be any different?
Change Management at Home
In infrastructure, we phase rollouts because we know that too much change at once causes outages. At home, the same principle applies, just with higher emotional stakes.