Systems

Most of what I write about happens here. Roles and stacks, no addresses — this is a description, not a map.

• Hardware

  Things I built or modified. Keyboards, controllers, and devices prised off their original firmware.

• Infrastructure

  The hosts and storage everything else runs on, and how they're deliberately separated.

• Apps

  The software. All of it open source, all of it self-hosted.

Operating rules

Each of these was written after something broke in a way that took too long to notice.

• Silence is not health. The absence of a signal has to be actively detected. It is never noticed passively.
• Fail loudly. A caught error is an invisible error. Most schedulers report success unless something throws.
• Watch the watcher. Monitoring has to be monitored by something it doesn't control.
• Survive a reboot. Verify autostart from the persisted configuration. Don't assume the process manager kept it.
• Break the alert once. An untested alert path is an assumption, not a control.