// blog

Blog

Field notes on distributed systems, Kubernetes, databases, AI, and engineering leadership.

20 posts 2025–2026

2026

Sep 5, 202616 min read

The Continuation That Never Woke Up

An order got stuck halfway through post processing. Somebody re-ran it. It went through fine. Ticket closed.

A few weeks later it happened again, and we did the same thing, because the same thing worked.

That is a great way to never fix anything.

The Continuation That Never Woke Up

hangfiredotnetdebuggingrace-conditionssql-server

Aug 20, 20262 min read

Finding It Isn't Fixing It

GitHub found the broken component about three hours into the August 17 outage. They were another four hours and thirty-nine minutes from done.

The status timeline has it at 16:36 UTC: “identified the problematic component and have taken corrective actions.” Then 17:30, Git Operations degraded again. 19:13, they partially disabled authentication token retries. Resolved 21:15. Seven hours forty-seven minutes, and most of it came after they knew what was wrong.

Nobody deployed anything. From the writeup, about this one and the one before it: “Neither outage was caused by a code or configuration …

reliabilityincidentsscalegithub

Jun 15, 20262 min read

Davit: A Native UI for Apple's Container Tool

I’ve spent the last week living in Apple’s container tool from the terminal. It’s good. But some days I want a window, a list of what’s running, and a button. Davit is that window.

It’s a native SwiftUI app. No Electron, no web view stuffed in a title bar. That alone put it ahead of most of the desktop container tooling I’ve tried.

The part I like: it doesn’t shell out to the container binary and scrape the output. It talks to the same platform the CLI does, straight over XPC. So the dashboard, the live CPU chart, the container list, the log tail, the filesystem browser all …

Davit: A Native UI for Apple's Container Tool

macoscontainersappleswiftui

Jun 13, 20261 min read

Helpful macOS Container Tool Commands

I’ve been living in Apple’s container tool for the last few days. A handful of commands come up a lot, and other team members have asked how, so I’m writing them down. Here are the three I reach for most.

macoscontainersapplecli

Jun 12, 20262 min read

Running Ubuntu on Apple's Container

After getting Apple’s container running, the thing I actually wanted was a normal Ubuntu box to poke around in. That took one more step than I expected: systemd.

A container runs whatever its CMD is as PID 1. The stock ubuntu:26.04 image doesn’t ship an init, so you boot into a bare shell and not much else. If you want services, units, and a machine that behaves like a real Ubuntu install, systemd has to be the thing running as init. So you build your own image.

Here’s the Dockerfile. Most of it is the well-worn systemd-in-a-container cleanup: install systemd, then delete the units that make no …

macoscontainersubuntusystemddocker

Jun 12, 20262 min read

Apple's Container Tool

Apple has a CLI for running Linux containers on macOS now. It’s called container, and the part I care about is that it doesn’t need Docker Desktop.

The design choice that makes it interesting: there’s no single shared Linux VM that every container piles into. Each container gets its own lightweight VM. So you get real isolation for free, boots are quick, and it all sits on top of Apple’s Containerization Swift package. Images are plain OCI, so the registries and the pull/build/push workflow you already know carry over. The requirements are stricter than I’d like, though: Apple …

macoscontainersappledocker

Jun 10, 20261 min read

A Single Border and a Better Radius

I read the release notes. I just opened a Finder window and it feels better, and it took me a second to figure out why.

It’s two things. There’s now a single vertical border between the sidebar and the content pane, so the two regions actually feel like two regions instead of one dark expanse where the divider was only implied by a shift in shade. And the inner corners got a slightly larger, more consistent radius that lines up with the outer window. That’s it. No new feature, nothing to learn.

The smallest possible line in the right place does more than any amount of gradient or shadow. One …

A Single Border and a Better Radius

macosdesignux

May 27, 20263 min read

You're the Typist

There’s a question I ask engineers when they hand me an AI generated PR: “walk me through what this does.”

If they can, the PR is usually fine. If they can’t, the PR is almost always broken. Not visibly broken. Not the kind of broken that fails a test. The kind of broken that ships, sits in production for six months, and then takes down a service at 2am because nobody knew the cache invalidation only ran on the leader.

AI doesn’t fix that. AI makes it worse.

aiengineeringleadership