The best automation is the script you wrote once and forgot about. Until you realize you’d be miserable without it. That’s the bar I hold every workflow script to: will this save me more time than it took to write? Most “productivity automation” content you find online fails that test. The scripts look clever in a conference talk, end up in your dotfiles, and collect dust. They solve hypothetical problems, not real ones. ...
A Kubernetes Secret is not actually secret. That’s a hard sentence to sit with, especially if you’ve been dutifully creating Secret objects and patting yourself on the back for not hardcoding credentials in your ConfigMap. The problem runs deeper than most teams realize, and it doesn’t get fixed by following the basic Kubernetes documentation. This post is about what actually works, at different scales, with honest tradeoffs for each approach. ...
This is the final post in “The Centaur’s Toolkit” series, where we’ve explored practical strategies for human-AI collaboration in technical work. This installment steps back from specific tools and practices to ask the bigger question: what does all of this mean for your career? Everyone’s asking if AI will take their job. They’re asking the wrong question. I’ve been watching this conversation play out across tech communities for the past couple of years, and the framing bothers me. “Will AI replace programmers?” produces a yes/no answer that nobody actually believes, regardless of which direction they lean. It generates heat without light. ...
It started with a misconfigured CI runner. A developer had a Jenkins pipeline building Docker images. The container ran as root. A dependency had a known RCE vulnerability. When the exploit landed, the attacker had root inside the container, and because that process was root, they also had root on the host. They pivoted to the secrets store, grabbed credentials, and spent three weeks inside the network before anyone noticed. ...
This post continues “The Centaur’s Toolkit” series on practical human-AI collaboration in technical work. The error showed up in production on a Wednesday afternoon. sqlalchemy.exc.OperationalError: (psycopg2.OperationalError) SSL SYSCALL error: EOF detected I knew this error. Or thought I did. Stack Overflow had dozens of answers: upgrade psycopg2, check your SSL certificates, adjust your connection timeout. I’d even hit this error two years earlier on a different project, and the fix had been a connection pool configuration change. ...