Posts

Building a Personal Cloud · Part 1

I Never Meant to Build a Personal Cloud

What began as a home AI lab became a personal platform for experimentation, self-hosting, learning, and building future capabilities.

The runner was easy. The platform was the real engineering

Self-hosting a GitHub Actions runner is easy. Turning runners into a secure, scalable, self-service organisational capability is a platform-engineering problem.

How judgement, not technical skill, defines a senior engineer

Why technical ability is only the foundation of seniority, and sound judgement determines who can be trusted with consequential engineering decisions.

Designing a personal learning platform

What if you approached learning like a platform engineer—building a system that makes every future capability easier to acquire?

The dashboard is not the work

Why visible developer activity is a poor substitute for engineering value and system health.

Don't steal people's failure

Why recoverable failure is essential for developing judgement, capability, and resilient teams.

Hidden costs of ownership

The obligations, friction, and opportunity costs hidden behind acquiring and keeping things.

Design the conditions

How our surroundings, defaults, and tools quietly shape the way we think, work, and behave.

Personal systems are production systems

Applying production engineering principles to the systems that support everyday life.

Engineer for Durability

Why sustained success depends less on peak performance than on capacity, recovery, and staying in the game.