My Blogs

Notes on security compliance, AI systems, storage and the craft of leading engineering work.

AI · 2026-08-04

A working reference: 20 prompts, the repos, the MCP servers and the models

The bookmarks I actually reuse — prompt patterns, repositories, MCP servers and a model shortlist. A snapshot, not a ranking.

Leadership · 2026-08-01

Release management is a design job, not a calendar job

If shipping is stressful every time, the problem is structural.

Cybersecurity · 2026-07-31

Hardening at scale without drowning the team in findings

A scanner that reports everything reports nothing. Triage design matters more than coverage.

Cybersecurity · 2026-07-28

Detection is the hard part: what building a compliance engine taught me

Everyone talks about remediating findings. Almost nobody talks about the work of deciding what counts as a finding in the first place.

Cybersecurity · 2026-07-24

Zero trust, past the slogan

Most zero-trust programmes stall in the same place, and it is not the technology.

AI · 2026-07-21

When an AI agent found what a room full of engineers could not

A deployment failure sat open for over two weeks. What actually broke it loose says something specific about where agents are useful.

Cybersecurity · 2026-07-17

Compliance as code, honestly

Encoding a control is an act of interpretation. Pretending otherwise is how audits go badly.

Storage · 2026-07-14

Storage is a distributed systems problem wearing a boring hat

The industry treats storage as infrastructure plumbing. The actual constraints are as sharp as anything in distributed systems.

AI · 2026-07-10

Agents are not junior employees, and the metaphor is costing you

The 'digital coworker' framing predicts the wrong failures.

Storage · 2026-07-07

Migrations are where storage systems tell the truth

Steady state hides everything. A cutover hides nothing.

Leadership · 2026-07-03

Mentoring is not answering questions

The fastest way to help is often the least useful.

AI · 2026-06-26

RAG is mostly retrieval, and mostly not about the model

When a RAG system disappoints, the model is rarely the reason.

Storage · 2026-06-19

The quiet cost of a rebuild

Redundancy is not free, and the bill arrives at the worst time.

Leadership · 2026-06-12

What managing seven people taught me about technical work

The technical judgement did not stop mattering. It changed what it was for.

I love to make complex looking systems easy to understand — whether it is life or software!