Blog
Technical notes on infrastructure, automation, and building tools that stay useful even when the AI layer isn't available.
Rolling out distributed tracing without breaking what already worked
August 10, 2026Onboarding a Java microservices platform onto distributed tracing without asking any team to touch their code, and without disturbing the logging and metrics pipelines already running in production.
Filing my first patent: what the process actually taught me
July 8, 2026The invention itself is still confidential while the application is pending, so this isn't a technical write-up. It's what I learned going through prior-art research and defending the idea to a patent attorney for the first time.
Cloud cost optimization: three initiatives that actually moved the needle
June 15, 2026Reserved-capacity planning for DynamoDB, traffic-aware rightsizing for Aerospike, and a unified multi-cloud cost dashboard -- three different approaches to the same underlying problem: spend that had drifted away from actual usage.
One chat interface instead of five tools: building Lens
April 22, 2026Investigating an issue across metrics, logs, and a database usually means several open tools and a manual correlation step. Lens replaces that with one natural-language chat interface — here's the architecture behind it.
Filling a gap in the Terraform MongoDB Atlas provider
March 18, 2026Why I published terraform-mongodbatlas-indexes: declarative, YAML-driven MongoDB Atlas index management, backed by unit tests, a live-database integration test, and CI on every push.
Finding the process behind a noisy VM: AI-based root cause analysis across a fleet
February 10, 2026Cortex VM Analyzer compares a suspect host's VM- and process-level metrics against a healthy peer, and uses AI-based analysis to name the specific process behind a resource bottleneck or memory leak -- before anyone opens application logs.