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Field notes

Writing.

14 long-form write-ups in draft — one per capability drill we run on engagements. Peter reviews and publishes each as it's ready. Every post is grounded in real work, caveated honestly, and linkable. RSS + a sparse email list land with the first published piece; no tracking pixels, readable archive without giving up an address.

BentoML01 / 14

Serving a Whisper speech-to-text model

Autoscaling, cost-curve, and handover runbook for a production Whisper deployment on a single-node K3s + L4 GPU.

Draft →

BentoML02 / 14

A/B testing two inference servers

Shadow → canary → cutover with Envoy `weighted_clusters`, NATS shadow bus, and auto-rollback abort conditions.

Draft →

Firecracker03 / 14

Per-tenant microVM sandbox in 200 LOC

Jailer + rootfs + single-TAP isolation, hand-driven, with a blast-radius audit that mirrors the /firecracker/ threat model.

Draft →

Firecracker04 / 14

Ignite + Firecracker for CI runner isolation

Ephemeral microVM runner pool for GitHub Actions, with cost break-even vs hosted + concurrent-job leak test.

Draft →

NATS05 / 14

Event-driven microservices on NATS JetStream

Document-ingest + OCR + KV + object-store pipeline with idempotent replay drill and single-node-kill failure test.

Draft →

NATS06 / 14

NATS as a service-mesh data plane alternative

5-service demo using NATS `micro` framework + per-service accounts + leaf-node locality. Honest trade-off vs Envoy.

Draft →

SeaweedFS07 / 14

S3-compatible storage on a Raspberry Pi cluster

4-Pi topology with master-failover drill, apples-to-apples benchmark vs Longhorn, and erasure-coding recovery.

Draft →

SeaweedFS08 / 14

Mount SeaweedFS as Kubernetes persistent volume

CSI driver + Postgres workload + `fio` matrix yielding a choice-tree runbook for SeaweedFS vs Longhorn.

Draft →

Azure Cognitive09 / 14

Wire Speech-to-Text into an edge pipeline

Envoy `ext_authz` → sha256-keyed SeaweedFS cache → Azure STT on miss. Measured 25-30% Azure cost cut on 30%-repeat workload.

Draft →

Azure Cognitive10 / 14

Content Safety as a middleware gate

Per-route opt-in Envoy gate → Azure Content Safety. 500-item corpus eval + fail-open vs fail-closed decision record.

Draft →

Kubernetes11 / 14

Air-gapped RKE2 bootstrap in 90 minutes

Pre-staged bundle + bootstrap script that survives a procurement-grade transfer to sealed hosts. From cold iron to `kubectl get nodes` under 90 minutes.

Draft →

Envoy12 / 14

Per-API-key rate limiting with a Redis-backed global service

Production-shape global rate limits across N Envoy replicas via the upstream `ratelimit` service + Redis. Includes fail-open vs fail-closed decision drill.

Draft →

Cross-cutting13 / 14

Observability triad · Grafana + Mimir + Loki + Tempo

Platform artefact: the default open-source observability baseline every other piece links to.

Draft →

Cross-cutting14 / 14

Runbook: rolling back a bad Divi 5 update without the Migrator

Staged upgrade + regression classification + reversible rollback scripts. Applies to our own site.

Draft →

Method

How we write.

Each post starts as a real engagement — a thing we ran, a decision we had to make, a failure mode we tripped over. No speculative content, no LLM-generated filler. Every piece has: a concrete goal, a reproducible lab, measured outputs, and a section on what we'd do differently. Expect screenshots, code listings, and the occasional "here's why the vendor docs are wrong" callout.

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