Operational notes
Notes
Notes from running production systems: troubleshooting, recovery, and the checks that remove ambiguity under pressure. Written down so the same incident does not have to be solved twice.
engineering
And on the Seventh Day, He Rested: Lessons from Genesis for the Age of AI
What a tiny artificial-life simulation taught me about creation, emergence, and free will — and why building complex AI systems keeps pulling engineers back to the oldest story about setting initial conditions and letting go.
- artificial-intelligence
- emergence
- complex-systems
- philosophy-of-engineering
- free-will
3 min read · 6/11/2026
security
Assume the Server Is Compromised: A Password Manager's Threat Model
The threat model behind Vault, a client-side encrypted password manager built so that a fully compromised server still cannot read your secrets — architecture, trust boundaries, and honest limits.
- threat-model
- client-side-encryption
- cryptography
- zero-trust
- password-manager
12 min read · 5/31/2026
engineering
Don't Kill a Mosquito with a Bazooka
Over-engineering quietly costs more than it saves. Why operational maturity, simplicity, and designing for failure still beat the newest framework — even in the age of AI.
- over-engineering
- simplicity
- resilience
- operational-maturity
- software-architecture
4 min read · 5/31/2026
security-infrastructure
Cloudflare Access Java JWT Validation Patterns
Validating Cloudflare Access identity in Java services without over-trusting the client — and locking the origin so the gate cannot be bypassed.
- cloudflare-access
- java
- jwt
- zero-trust
3 min read · 5/30/2026
security-infrastructure
Designing Private Routes with Zero Trust
Choosing how to actually gate a private route with Cloudflare Access — what it secures, where the bypass gaps are, and the misconfigurations that quietly leave it open.
- zero-trust
- cloudflare-access
- private-routes
- security
3 min read · 5/30/2026