Writing
Blog
Engineering stories and short field notes from building, breaking, and operating real systems. Read the full story, or pick up one useful discovery.
10 posts · Newest first
Field Note
"Already compliant" is a success state
An Ansible task should succeed when the machine is already in the desired state.
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Field Note
Cloned VM = same host keys + machine-id
A cloned lab VM needs its own identity before it joins the cluster.
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Field Note
Isolated-machine mode disables SSH agent forwarding — by design
The OrbStack isolation setting behind an unexpected SSH authentication problem.
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Field Note
OrbStack VMs ship without openssh-server
An SSH connection failure in the lab started with a missing service, not a bad key.
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Field Note
A single tab in a YAML heredoc
A small indentation mistake that stopped an Ansible playbook before it could run.
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Article
The cluster that almost wasn't
Stage 1 of Ship Boring Lab: building a two-node Kubernetes cluster from scratch, debugging SSH, cloned VM identities, Ansible edge cases, and the failures hiding underneath the automation.
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Article
Build, Break & Operate — a Ship Boring build-in-public series
The manifesto: why the best infrastructure is boring, why in-house tooling deserves a public rebuild, and the five rules this series will not break.
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Article
Stop collecting skills. Build a skill stack.
The goal isn't to learn everything. It's to become good at solving problems that actually matter.
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Field Note
A good day of building and learning
Refreshing programming fundamentals, making progress on a side project, and giving LearnWithSK its own identity.
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Article
AI can help us move faster, but it can't replace good engineering
AI is changing how we build and operate software. But as the tools get smarter, understanding what we are building and knowing when something is wrong becomes even more important.
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