Notes
What we learned on a specific project, written up so it’s useful on yours. A pattern that held, a failure worth naming, a decision and why it went the way it did.
- 16 Jul 2026generative AI & model serving
Region-pinning Claude on Vertex AI without fighting your model registry
Claude-on-Vertex serves from only a few regions; rarely the one hosting your agent. Pin conditionally, and return a model object so the registry's regex resolution gets out of the way.
- 09 Jul 2026agentic AI & platform engineering
A Paved Road for LLM Agents: Golden Paths, Resilient Tools, Boring Deploys
Treat agent delivery like any other production system; a scaffold-to-deploy golden path, tool connections that degrade instead of crashing the turn, and secrets tied to per-agent identity.
- 23 Jun 2026networking & security
Fail Closed on Database TLS: The Driver Default Is Cleartext
Most drivers default to no encryption and managed databases rarely force it, so a missing connection-string parameter connects in the clear with no error; refuse to boot without verified TLS, and prove it by reading the negotiated cipher.
- 20 May 2026configuration & platform data
Honest Per-Environment Scoring: When a Glob Eats Your Sandbox
A `**/production/**` glob that quietly swallows a sandbox nested under production, and why you should compute the criteria that don't vary once instead of faking N independent audits.
- 04 Nov 2025containers, clustering & networking
Ephemeral Jobs as Transport: Probing From Inside a Cluster Without a Resident Agent
When a reachability test only means something from the real source network, ship the probe as a throwaway Kubernetes Job and read the answer out of the pod's logs.
- 20 Oct 2025data & observability
A Window Is Not a Ledger: Metrics That Survive a Rolling-Window Feed
Why "total raised" is uncomputable from a feed that only ever shows you the last 31 days, and what to report instead.