From the Filing Cabinet
The blog that ran on this domain from 2011 to 2016 has spent the years since as a WordPress export on GitHub Pages, which is roughly the digital equivalent of a box in the loft. It's finally being switched off, so before it went I read all 96 posts.
Most of them deserve to go. There are link posts to videos that no longer exist, an enthusiastic review of Ubuntu 11.04, a fair amount of PHP, and a detailed account of Rackspace's first-generation cloud that is now of interest mainly to archaeologists. Seven made it across:
- Why a Sysadmin? (2011)
- Case Study: Optimising a Cloud Application (2011)
- Burnout: The Elephant in the Room (2013)
- Burnout Is a Security Issue Too (2013)
- Scaling Feature Switches (2013)
- Ten Things I Wish I'd Known at the Start of My Career (2014)
- Microservices Payload Design (2015)
What they have in common is that the tooling has rotted and the problem hasn't. The case study is Munin, Nagios, Varnish and APC, none of which I'd reach for today, but the startup in it could scale out and couldn't stop paying for it, which describes a depressing number of the Kubernetes clusters I've looked at since. We call it FinOps now, and there's a certification. The fix hasn't changed: measure, standardise, write it down, and only then touch the architecture.
The feature-switches post solved flag lookups with a ten-second local cache and a RabbitMQ fanout. Feature flags have since become a product category, and the products do much the same thing. The payload post is distributed tracing done by hand, a few years before it had a standard.
The burnout posts matter most to me. In 2013 I stood up at DevOpsDays London and told 250 people I'd burnt out, which at the time was not a normal thing to say into a microphone. The industry talks about it far more now. It designs on-call rotations about as badly as it did then, which is why I wrote The Pager Is a Smoke Detector, Not a Doorbell.
They keep their original dates. I've fixed the spelling and dropped dead links, but I haven't rewritten the opinions. Where the advice has aged badly – loading your JavaScript from a shared public CDN, for one – there's a marked 2026 note rather than a quiet correction. I'd rather show where I was wrong than pretend I wasn't. The exception is one sum in the feature-switches post, which survived thirteen years before a code-review bot noticed it was wrong. That one I've just fixed.