Notes
Short write-ups from real systems, documenting decisions, trade-offs, and what I would do differently next time.
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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January 2026
How I set up GitLab CE with automated pipelines on my self-hosted platform, and what I learned the hard way about SSL termination, reverse proxies, and infrastructure design.
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January 2026
Why MSP environments reward restoration over prevention, and how to design operations that fix root causes without heroics.
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December 2025
A late December reset: observability across the stack, agentic workflows, self-healing, and the certifications I am chasing in the new year.
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December 2025
I stood up my own GitLab CE runners and automated deployments without leaning on an off the shelf service.
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