Blog

Random thoughts on technology, teams, and leadership. Content from defunct blogs and companies will be added from time to time. Opinions expressed here are my own.

Latest Post

Aug 28, 2025

From Line Cook to Chef: Lessons for Presales Engineering

A line cook can create perfect menu items by following recipes. A chef can create new dishes on the fly, improvise when needed, and handle unexpected situations. The chef also usually gets to wear a cool hat. I recently noticed a pattern among some presales engineers (SEs) that reminded me of my early days in food service. There are SEs who excel at delivering polished, rehearsed demos that they can execute flawlessly as long as the script doesn’t change and nothing unexpected happens. Read more

All Posts

2025

  • Aug 28, 2025 - From Line Cook to Chef: Lessons for Presales Engineering
  • Aug 2, 2025 - Leaders Who Fail Up: The LinkedIn Rebrand of Failure
  • Aug 1, 2025 - Running Slurm and Flux on Oxide: Dual HPC Schedulers in Your Own Rack
  • Jul 15, 2025 - PXE Booting on Oxide
  • Jun 12, 2025 - Printed on 24 lb. Paper
  • Jun 10, 2025 - Everything Is Political: Embrace It
  • May 23, 2025 - ‘This Is Just How We Do Things Now’: The Quiet Collapse of Standards
  • May 13, 2025 - Find a New Band
  • Feb 21, 2025 - The Fence We Keep Ignoring
  • 2024

  • Dec 23, 2024 - The Parable of the Slow-Boiled Frog
  • Aug 13, 2024 - Managing Kubernetes Contexts with kubectx
  • Apr 18, 2024 - Mirroring Github to Gitlab…Without Premium
  • Apr 15, 2024 - Of NGINX and Pianos
  • Feb 7, 2024 - Cleaner Dockerfiles with HEREDOC
  • Jan 22, 2024 - Adding Trivy to Harbor
  • Jan 7, 2024 - Setting up Harbor as a Local Docker Registry
  • 2023

  • Sep 10, 2023 - Installing the Official NGINX OSS via Ansible Playbook
  • Aug 7, 2023 - Installing the Official NGINX OSS Package via Script
  • Aug 1, 2023 - Breaking Down Silos
  • Jul 14, 2023 - Proxmox LXC and Terraform
  • Jul 13, 2023 - Setting Up Devboxen With Ansible
  • Jul 5, 2023 - Proxmox VMs and Terraform
  • Jun 25, 2023 - Building Proxmox Templates via Script
  • Jun 22, 2023 - Convergent and Divergent Thinking
  • Jun 14, 2023 - Systems and the Cobra Effect
  • Jun 13, 2023 - Umpires
  • Jun 12, 2023 - Situational Awareness
  • Jun 9, 2023 - Back Online