Notes on platform engineering, AI tooling and craft.
Agentic AI is less about bigger models and more about reliable tool use. A field guide to the open-weight stack — Nous Research’s Hermes and NVIDIA’s Nemotron — and how to build agents that do not fall over.
Read article →Microsoft Fabric puts your data in OneLake; Copilot Studio lets you build agents on top of it. Here is how the two connect — grounding, the SQL endpoint, Fabric data agents — and the traps to avoid.
Read article →Data lakes are cheap but messy; warehouses are fast but rigid. The lakehouse pattern — Delta Lake, Unity Catalog and the medallion architecture — is how Databricks fuses both. Here is what actually matters.
Read article →Published May 24, 2026
Two decades of IAM experience condensed into a candid comparison: licensing maths, protocol flexibility, Conditional Access, migration pain, and why most enterprises end up running both.
Read article →Published May 27, 2026
A hands-on comparison of the two leading open-source AI agents: persistent memory vs plugin ecosystem, seven-layer security vs plugin CVEs, skills vs 5,700 plugins, and why Hermes wins for long-term workflows.
Read article →Published May 21, 2026
A candid look at SailPoint’s real value: certification excellence vs implementation pain, BeanShell debt, upgrade nightmares, and when you should pick something else.
Read article →Published May 18, 2026
The real-world pain of BeanShell rules and custom connectors in SailPoint IdentityIQ: null traps, silent failures, BuildMap errors, and what changes when you move to ISC.
Read article →Published May 15, 2026
The hard truths about migrating from SailPoint IdentityIQ to Identity Security Cloud: what breaks, what gets lost, and why your custom Java rules are now a liability.
Read article →May 10, 2026
Production patterns for running Keycloak in HA mode: database replication, Infinispan rebalancing, load balancer config, and what happens when a node disappears.
Read article →May 13, 2026
A practical guide to Keycloak recovery scenarios: split-brain in Infinispan, corrupted database sequences, stuck migration, dangling sessions, and broken trust stores.
Read article →April 30, 2026
Three principles I keep coming back to when teams ask me what their cloud should look like once it stops being a prototype.
April 25, 2026
A practical mental model for designing IAM that survives growth without turning into the team that rubber-stamps wildcards.
April 22, 2026
Three patterns I lean on to bring modern AI into enterprise platforms without turning the team into permanent firefighters.
April 18, 2026
A practical map of which local AI workflows are real and which only look real, on a Mac with 16 GB of unified memory.
April 12, 2026
A pragmatic decision guide for picking between systemd timers and cron, written from the trenches of running both for years.
April 5, 2026
How I keep a fast, repeatable Mac dev setup without ending up with 600 packages I cannot account for.
March 28, 2026
I have run Kubernetes in production for years. Here are the four signals that tell me a team should not be running it yet.