Alexandre Nuttinck

The One Person Who Knows

Tue, 07 Jul 2026 10:00:00 +0200

Every company has one. That one sysadmin sitting behind a fortress of monitors, cables, and coffee cups. They are the legend of the open space. When a complex legacy system acts up, colleagues point at them in reverence and whisper:

“That’s the one who knows everything. Don’t touch anything without asking them.”

But this legendary status comes with a dark side: Solo Mode. Whenever an over-eager junior dev or a desperate teammate tries to peek at the terminal and politely asks for a runbook or documentation, the answer is always the same annoyed grumble:

The Midnight Doubt

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 10:00:00 +0200

We’ve all been there. It’s 5:00 PM, you’re packing up your bag, and the client leans against your desk looking relaxed but serious with a casual request:

“Hey, the cloud bill is getting scary. Can you just turn off the big servers when you leave tonight?”

Without missing a beat, you give the classic sysadmin guarantee: “No worries. I’ll hit the ‘Stop’ button manually before I head out. Consider it done.” It’s a simple promise. What could go wrong?

The Meeting Singularity

Tue, 16 Jun 2026 10:00:00 +0200

It starts as a classic sysadmin trap. I was assigned to five projects at the same time… At first glance, you tell yourself, “Busy… but manageable.”. After all, spinning up infrastructure and automating pipelines for multiple environments is just part of the job.

But then comes the calendar takeover.

Each project came with its own meetings. Suddenly, your schedule is completely packed from morning to evening. The deep-work time you need to write actual code is rapidly replaced by a wall of colored blocks representing a status meeting, a sync call, an alignment meeting, and a steering committee. You find yourself staring at your screen, muttering, “When do I actually work?”.

Annual Review Season

Sat, 06 Jun 2026 10:00:00 +0200

It’s a classic tale in the world of IT and operations. All year long, you grind through on-call nights, manage complex migrations, and extinguish fires before anyone even realizes there was smoke. You look at your screens, and everything is beautifully stable. All systems are operational.

Then comes the dreaded annual review meeting.

You sit down in the small meeting room across from your manager, ready to present hard facts. You calmly explain your solid list of technical achievements:

The Two-Day Onboarding

Tue, 19 May 2026 10:00:00 +0200

There is an unspoken rule in IT: the amount of time an employee stays at a company is inversely proportional to the effort it took to bring them there.

This story is a perfect example. We spent months dealing with heavy paperwork, organizing a visa, and sorting out relocation and housing just to bring a new colleague over from the US. When the big day finally arrived, the whole team welcomed our new hire with bright smiles. We even put a small US flag on their desk, right next to their freshly printed badge and ready-to-go laptop.

The 20,000-Dollar Commit

Sun, 03 May 2026 10:00:00 +0200

It started as a perfectly normal afternoon. A developer, happily working at their desk, pushed some code to a public repository. But that colleague made a tiny, seemingly harmless mistake. In the rush to get things done, he hardcoded an AWS access key and pushed it straight to a public repository.

“Maybe no one saw it… right?”

That is the desperate hope of every engineer who realizes what they’ve just done. But the internet never sleeps, and more importantly, the scraping bots never sleep. Within seconds of that repository going public, the keys were harvested.

The Schrödinger Server

Sun, 03 May 2026 10:00:00 +0200

Before we dive into today’s infrastructure mystery, you might notice a slight shift in the comic’s aesthetic! Starting with this story, I’ve switched the AI image generation model I use from gpt-image-1 to Nano Banana Pro.

While the art style has evolved a bit, the trade-offs are incredibly worth it. I’m getting much better visual coherence across the panels, and the model produces far fewer “hallucinations.” This allows me to reach the exact framing I want much faster, giving me more time to refine the small details. Honestly, I’m having a blast with it! 😄

The Cowboy Sysadmin

Mon, 27 Apr 2026 10:00:00 +0200

The Grafana dashboards are glowing a reassuring green, and the ticket queue is finally down to single digits, when he walks into the open space.

The Cowboy Sysadmin.

He doesn’t need automated deployment scripts. He scoffs at the concept of a “read-only” Friday. To him, SSH-ing directly into the production server as root isn’t a violation of company policy; it’s a lifestyle choice.

In this week’s Adventures in Uptime, we chronicle the legendary, high-adrenaline, and deeply terrifying phenomenon of “Cowboy Ops.” It’s that magical, heart-stopping moment when someone decides to run rm -rf in the wild without a safety net.

The Update Panic

Tue, 21 Apr 2026 10:00:00 +0200

I’ve worked with a lot of developers over the years, but there is one I’ll never forget. His code was… fine. Mostly functional. But the moment it was time to deploy? Total meltdown.

While most of the team treats a deployment as a routine click, he treated it like he was defusing a live bomb. Sweating bullets, his finger would tremble over the “Deploy to Production” button like he was about to launch a rocket. In his mind, a single typo wasn’t just going to break the build: it was going to take down the entire infrastructure, permanently erase the database, and somehow set the office coffee machine on fire.

Baptism of Fire

Mon, 13 Apr 2026 10:00:00 +0200

It started like any normal morning. Coffee in hand, sleepy colleagues, the gentle hum of the open space. And then… total darkness.

“Did someone trip on a cable?”

We weren’t too worried at first. After all, we had an UPS and a massive diesel generator out back. It was supposed to be our safety net.

Well, the safety net had a massive hole in it. The generator sputtered, coughed, and died with a sad pouf. Suddenly, our entire server room went completely silent. If you work in IT, you know there is nothing more terrifying than a cold, dead-silent server room.

Version Control by Outlook

Mon, 23 Mar 2026 10:00:00 +0200

We’ve all been there: joining a new project, grabbing a fresh cup of coffee, and asking the developer the most basic, innocent question imaginable:

“Hey, where’s the code repo for your project?”

You expect a Github link, maybe a Gitlab URL, or even an ancient SVN server if you’re feeling unlucky. What you don’t expect is the developer to smile with 100% unshakeable confidence and say:

The Intern Factory

Mon, 16 Mar 2026 10:00:00 +0200

Ah, the memories of early consulting missions. You walk into a new client’s office, expecting the usual setup: a grizzled senior dev nursing their third coffee, a stressed sysadmin, and a project manager asking for the impossible by Friday.

But sometimes, you walk into something entirely different. You walk into a modern-day “cost-efficiency” miracle.

In Belgium, there’s a well-known reality for startups and budget-conscious companies: student internships are often unpaid. During one of my very first missions, I encountered a company that didn’t just use this system… They built their entire engineering department around it.

The KubeCon Goodies Hunt

Tue, 10 Mar 2026 10:00:00 +0200

We’ve all been there. You register for a major tech conference like KubeCon with the best intentions. You mark the schedule with all the deep-dive technical sessions you want to attend. You promise yourself you’ll network with industry leaders and learn about the latest in service mesh architecture.

Then you walk into the expo hall.

“Grab a hoodie! Free socks! Do you want a light-up yoyo that connects to Bluetooth?”

Everything is Priority

Sun, 01 Mar 2026 10:00:00 +0200

We’ve all been in that meeting. The one where the manager stands in front of a whiteboard covered in sticky notes, eyes wide with excitement.

“Okay team. These are all top priority tasks!”

You scan the board. “Urgent.” “Critical.” “Do Now.” “Top Priority.”

Every single item is flagged as essential. Every feature is a must-have. Every bug is a showstopper.

When you ask the logical question: “If they are all priority one, which one do we do first?”. You get the classic answer:

Bitnamipocalypse

Mon, 16 Feb 2026 10:00:00 +0200

Do you remember where you were last summer when the notification popped up?

It started as a normal morning in DevOps. You were sipping your coffee, scrolling through GitHub issues, thinking the day would be about optimization or maybe finally tackling some tech debt. Then you saw it: bitnami/charts issue #35164.

The announcement was brief, but the implications were heavy: Community charts were moving. The migration window? One month…

Working from Shed

Mon, 09 Feb 2026 10:00:00 +0200

Remote work has invited us into everyone’s homes. We’ve all seen the kitchen counters, the unmade beds in the background, or the cats walking across keyboards.

But during a video call, I witnessed a setup that truly redefined “dedication.”

I called a colleague for a quick sync. When his video feed popped up, I didn’t see a home office or a living room. I saw wooden planks, a lawnmower, and a shovel hanging on the wall.

Caught by Your Own Phish

Mon, 02 Feb 2026 10:00:00 +0200

We often talk about the “human firewall” in cybersecurity. But sometimes, that firewall has a few open ports due to distraction.

This story comes from a security team I worked with. One of the team was deeply involved in the elaboration of the quarterly internal phishing simulation. He spent days brainstorming with the team, debating the best subject lines, and fine-tuning the fake login page to make it look just authentic enough to fool the unwary.

The Desk Production Server

Mon, 26 Jan 2026 10:00:00 +0200

We live in the era of the Cloud, Kubernetes clusters, and geo-redundant data centers. But sometimes, the most critical infrastructure is much closer to the ground. Literally.

This story comes from a moment of pure realization. I was at the office while a colleague was working remotely. He called me up, looking a bit sheepish, and asked for a favor: “Can you reboot the tower under my desk? There was a power cut and it didn’t come back up.”

Alias of Shame

Mon, 19 Jan 2026 10:00:00 +0200

Mistakes happen. Even in carefully planned communication campaigns.

One day, a brand-new email campaign was sent out to a large audience. Everything looked fine… until someone noticed it.

The email address in the communication was wrong.

Panic followed quickly.

Instead of preparing a simple correction and sending a follow-up email with the proper address, the communication team came to us with a different request:

Just Use Nix

Mon, 12 Jan 2026 10:00:00 +0200

It all started with a classic developer frustration:

“Why doesn’t this app build the same way on my machine?!”

A colleague leaned over, smiling with the confidence of someone who has already been converted:

“You should just use Nix.”

How complicated could it be?

Well… Nix isn’t just a package manager. It’s a whole paradigm shift: reproducibility, determinism, portability, system stability: everything defined declaratively. It promises environments that never drift and setups that behave exactly the same everywhere. And then there’s NixOS. Not just a tool, but an entire operating system built on the same ideas.

Christmas Sweater Outage

Mon, 22 Dec 2025 10:00:00 +0200

We had a Christmas Sweater Day at the office with colleagues. Let’s just say… that day was particularly inspiring. 😄

This also feels like a good moment to slow things down a bit. There won’t be any new Adventures in Uptime stories next week. But don’t worry, I still enjoy creating these little comic strips just as much, and there will be more to come in 2026!

Load Test Reality

Mon, 15 Dec 2025 10:00:00 +0200

It was a new mission: run performance tests on an application built by another consultant. The goal was simple: either confirm everything was fine, or prove there were real performance issues.

The original consultant was very confident. From his point of view, there was no problem at all.

“We tested with JMeter. It scales perfectly. No problem.”

Let’s just say… our results didn’t exactly match that statement.

The Coffee Crisis

Tue, 09 Dec 2025 10:00:00 +0200

It’s a classic scene in any office… but even more so in IT. Caffeine consumption is high, dependency is real, and when the coffee machine goes down, everything suddenly becomes a critical incident.

What always makes me laugh is how seriously teams treat it, almost like a real outage (including myself 😅). Emergency discussions, improvised failover plans, desperate workarounds… All for a working espresso.

The Accidental Production

Mon, 01 Dec 2025 10:00:00 +0200

It started as a simple mission: build a Kubernetes POC to explore the benefits and rethink the current architecture. The demo worked, the checklist was green, everyone was happy.

We made it clear to the client:

“This is only a demo environment, nothing critical.”

They nodded, satisfied. We moved on.

A few weeks later, the phone rang. It was the same client. Except this time, they didn’t sound calm at all. 😨

AI Title Generator

Mon, 24 Nov 2025 10:00:00 +0200

I was browsing LinkedIn and a few other platforms, looking for sysadmin or system engineer positions. Nothing. Or almost nothing.

It turns out that “System Administrator” is apparently too old-school now. The title seems to have quietly disappeared, replaced by an explosion of new ones: DevOps Engineer, Cloud Engineer, Platform Engineer, Site Reliability Engineer, Cloud Architect… and even Operations Ninja.

All these roles sound different, yet when you read the job descriptions, they all seem to mean the same thing. Run servers, automate stuff, fix things, you know, the usual.

Untouchable Server

Mon, 17 Nov 2025 10:00:00 +0200

Every IT team has that one server. The one sitting in the corner of the rack with a dusty case, a yellowed label that says “DO NOT TOUCH”, and an aura of mystery.

This one ran on RHEL 3. When it was first installed, I was around 10 or 12 years old. It had lived through hardware migrations, OS updates, and entire generations of sysadmins: or rather, survived them.

The Day Sysadmins Quit

Mon, 10 Nov 2025 10:00:00 +0200

This story is inspired by something very real: the invisible work of system administrators.

Their job isn’t to ship new features or flashy updates, it’s to make sure that everything just works. Servers stay up, backups run, emails flow, and systems stay secure. Most of it happens quietly, behind the scenes, where no one really notices… until something breaks.

Unfortunately, some managers don’t see that. When they don’t understand the technical side, they think “nothing’s happening.” Micromanagement takes over, trust disappears, and appreciation fades. And eventually, the sysadmins decide to leave. Because, let’s be honest, there’s no shortage of work for skilled people elsewhere.

The Million-Dollar Mistake

Mon, 03 Nov 2025 10:00:00 +0200

A major project had just been approved: a collaboration between several partners, with a generous budget to set up new infrastructure. One partner was in charge of purchasing the servers and hosting them in their datacenter. The plan was simple: coordinate with everyone, agree on the specifications, and move forward together.

Well… that last part didn’t happen.

Without consulting anyone, the partner decided to order high-end IBM proprietary Big Data servers, proudly announcing the purchase once it was too late to change anything. 💸

The Blue Screen of Container Death

Wed, 29 Oct 2025 10:00:00 +0200

It started as a new and exciting mission. The client needed help setting up proper CI/CD pipelines and introducing DevOps best practices. Everything sounded great.

Then came the small detail that hadn’t been mentioned during the initial discussions.

“Oh, by the way, our application runs on Windows… and we use Windows containers.”

I froze for a second. Windows… containers? I didn’t even know those existed before that project.

Cloud Loops

Wed, 22 Oct 2025 10:00:00 +0200

It happened during a mission for a client. They had decided to move everything to AWS, hoping to scale faster and more easily than with their old bare-metal self-hosted infrastructure.

At first, everything looked perfect. Deployments were smoother, scaling was instant, and everyone was proud of how modern it all felt. The promise of “infinite scalability” seemed within reach.

But then, the invoices started growing. Each month, the costs climbed higher, and every time the cluster expanded, the bill followed.

The Reproducibility Crisis

Wed, 15 Oct 2025 10:00:00 +0200

This one goes back to one of my very first missions. I arrived at the client’s office, full of energy, ready to dive into their development environment.

So I asked the classic first question:

“Can I get access to the dev environment?”

The answer? A USB key. Inside it, a virtual machine image, several gigabytes of it, along with a Word document as the only piece of documentation for the setup. No Git repository, no configuration management, …

Adventures in Uptime

Sun, 12 Oct 2025 09:00:00 +0200

Adventures in Uptime is a comic series born from real-life stories I’ve experienced during my years working in IT as a sysadmin and DevOps engineer.

It’s a humorous take on the sometimes absurd, always unpredictable world of technology, where coffee machines crash, servers live under desks, and “everything is a priority.”

I wanted to capture those everyday anecdotes we all laugh about later. The kind of moments that every engineer, sysadmin, or office worker has lived at least once. So I decided to turn them into comics.