Stop Buying SaaS for Tasks You Can Script
Every few weeks someone on my team shows me a new SaaS tool that promises to "revolutionize" some mundane task. Log rotation? There's a tool for…
Writing
Automation Notes
Practical notes on AI, automation, content sites, and the machinery behind the work.
Automation That Breaks at 2am: The Parts Nobody Talks About
You wrote the script. You set up the cron job. You added an alert. Done, right? Wrong. The problems start three months later when the script…
Production Automation Lessons for Personal Workflows
After fifteen years automating production systems and watching half-baked scripts destroy weekends, I've learned that the principles keeping enterprise infrastructure running are the same ones that…
Why Automation Breaks and the Boring Checks That Save You
Your automation worked fine in March. It's September now, and it's been failing silently for six weeks. That script that pulled your analytics? Dead. The CI…
Why Automation Breaks (And the Boring Checks That Save You)
Automation is great until it isn't. That's the part nobody tells you when they're selling you on the promise of pipelines that run themselves. I've been…
When to Automate: A No-Nonsense Decision Framework
Most automation advice is written by people who've never maintained a script in production. They see a repetitive task and immediately shout "automate it!" like it's…
Scripts vs Systems: The Difference That Costs You Sleep
Most IT folks I know have been burned by a "simple script" that turned into a maintenance nightmare. Or they've built something they called a system…
The Difference Between a Script and a System
Most IT folks I know have written a script that "just runs" for years. Maybe it's a Python wrapper, a Bash one-liner, or some cron job…
What Production Automation Taught Me About Personal Workflows
I spent two decades automating production systems before I realized I'd been ignoring the same problems at home. Not the same scale, obviously—my home lab isn't…
Scripts Run, Alerts Fire, and Then What?
You've got a script. It runs on cron. You set up an alert when it fails. You're done, right? Wrong. You've built the machine, but you…