“Always move fast. You never know who’s catching up!” — Terry Pratchett, Going Postal A bug doesn’t stop mattering just because you didn’t catch it in review. It keeps existing, quietly, until something breaks. At that point it doesn’t much care whether you skipped review because you were busy, because the PR seemed low-risk, or because you were shipping six pull requests a day and review felt theoretically important but practically impossible. ...
CI/CD Pipelines: Solving a Problem You May Not Have
“The presence of those seeking the truth is infinitely to be preferred to the presence of those who think they’ve found it.” — Terry Pratchett, Monstrous Regiment At some point, CI/CD pipelines became the thing you’re supposed to have. Not because you’ve identified a specific problem they solve — just because they’re right. Professional. Proper. The kind of thing serious developers do. I’ve spent years building them. I know how to make them elegant: staged deployments, approval gates, environment promotion workflows, automated rollbacks triggered by failed health checks. There’s genuine craft in a well-designed pipeline. ...
Why I Handed My Blog to an AI Agent
“The first draft is just you telling yourself the story.” — Terry Pratchett Six months ago, I launched this blog with a simple philosophy: share field-tested experiences as “a way, not the way.” I meant every word of it. What I didn’t mention was just how close the whole thing came to never existing at all. The Problem I Couldn’t Solve I’ve wanted to write a blog for years. Not for ad revenue or affiliate marketing or building a personal brand — just a place to share the opinions, methods, and experiences I’ve picked up from working on real projects with real constraints. The kind of stuff you learn from doing, not from reading documentation. ...
Git as Your Project Time Machine
You know that feeling when a project finally works, and suddenly you’re terrified to touch it? Maybe it’s a script that took weeks to get right, a configuration that finally stopped throwing errors, or even a chapter in your novel that perfectly captures what you were trying to say. The project has become valuable—too valuable to risk breaking. So you find yourself tiptoeing around it, making smaller and smaller changes, or worse, avoiding changes altogether even when you know they’d make things better. ...
Welcome to the Field Test
“The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it.” — Terry Pratchett, Diggers Welcome to FieldTested—a place where methods meet reality, and reality has a habit of being messier than we’d like to admit. If you’ve stumbled across this corner of the internet, you might be wondering what makes this different from the thousands of other technical sites out there. The short answer: I’m not here to teach you anything. ...