/ field notes

Things we've shipped, broken, and fixed.

The practical record: platform work, deployment systems, AI applications, and the production details that do not fit in a pitch deck.

infra
Stood up multi-account cloud landing zones. Migrated account estates into governed organizations. Written infrastructure modules that survive a re-org. Designed for regional failure isolation, and reduced unnecessary network spend without trading away resilience.
deploy
Blue/green, canary, and progressive delivery. CI pipelines with proper rollback — not “redeploy and hope.” Feature flags that do not leak state. Helm and Kustomize, GitOps patterns, and the judgment to know when not to add another sidecar.
compute
Container platforms, serverless workloads, ingress, workload identity, and cross-zone scheduling. Know when to pick a function, managed containers, or a real cluster. Know why a workload is OOM-killed and how to fix it without merely raising the limit.
ai dev
Built internal copilots engineers use daily. RAG systems over large document collections. Evaluation pipelines that catch regressions before users do. Know how to debug hallucination, not just talk about it.
ai apps
Built agent systems that take real actions on real systems. Tool servers and gateways, streaming responses, structured output, and safe tool-use loops. Applications that people depend on, not demos.
mcp
MCP servers for internal tools and gateways for multi-tenant access. Authentication, rate limiting, and audit logging at the tool layer. Know the difference between an MCP capability and a simple function call — and when each is appropriate.
guardrails
Prompt-injection defense beyond regex. Sensitive-data detection that does not break on ordinary names. Schema validation, evaluation pipelines, golden sets, and regression tests that preserve legitimate use.
compliance
Security documentation that stands up to review. Software bills of materials, supply-chain hardening, vulnerability remediation under SLA, and pragmatic controls without theater.
requirements
Turn vague business asks into technical specifications engineers can build from. Traceability from requirement to design to test to production. Fewer surprises, less rework.
code
Python, TypeScript, Go, and Rust when warranted. We read code, write code, review code, and ship code. The people in the conversation are the people who implement the work.