Posts

The Update Panic

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.

Tuesday, April 21, 2026 Read

Baptism of Fire

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.

Monday, April 13, 2026 Read

Version Control by Outlook

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:

Monday, March 23, 2026 Read

The Intern Factory

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.

Monday, March 16, 2026 Read

The KubeCon Goodies Hunt

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?”

Tuesday, March 10, 2026 Read

Everything is Priority

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:

Sunday, March 1, 2026 Read

Bitnamipocalypse

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…

Monday, February 16, 2026 Read

Working from Shed

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.

Monday, February 9, 2026 Read

Caught by Your Own Phish

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.

Monday, February 2, 2026 Read

The Desk Production Server

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.”

Monday, January 26, 2026 Read

Alias of Shame

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:

Monday, January 19, 2026 Read

Just Use Nix

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.

Monday, January 12, 2026 Read