Perspectives

Long form engineering perspectives on observability, reliability, incident management, and platform engineering.

These are living documents, shaped by experience and refined as that experience continues to grow.

Every Outage Is an Observability Audit.

Production incidents reveal far more than application failures. They expose the strengths and weaknesses of the entire observability platform.

4 min readRead Perspective

An Observability Platform Is a Product, Not a Collection of Tools.

Great observability platforms aren't assembled. They're intentionally designed, continually refined, and built around the people who rely on them.

7 min readRead Perspective

Your Observability Platform Doesn't Have a QA Team.

Every engineer using the platform becomes part of its feedback loop. The challenge is recognizing that before the next incident does.

4 min readRead Perspective

A Note on Perspective

I’m not interested in pretending engineering has one-size-fits-all answers.

These perspectives come from years of building, inheriting, troubleshooting, and improving observability platforms. Some were lessons learned the hard way. Others came from working alongside incredibly talented engineers who challenged the way I thought about problems.

Many of the most valuable lessons in my career didn’t come from getting something right the first time. They came from inheriting systems, carrying the pager, learning from outages, and listening to the people who relied on the platforms I helped build.

I’ve also learned that good engineering isn’t about defending an opinion. It’s about following the evidence, being open to different perspectives, and being willing to change your mind when someone shows you a better way.

My goal isn’t to convince you that my approach is the only one. Every organization, team, and environment is different. I hope these perspectives offer another way to think about your own systems. If one of them sparks an idea, challenges an assumption, or helps your team solve a problem, then it has done exactly what it was meant to do.