The Moment Bash Stops Being Good Enough The thing that finally broke our bash-based pipeline wasn’t a catastrophic failure — it was a Tuesday afternoon where three engineers spent 45 minutes staring at a deploy script trying to figure out why exit code 0 was returned on a job that clearly hadn’t finished correctly. The … Read more
The Problem: Border-Image Kills Border-Radius The first thing I tried when building a gradient border was exactly what you probably tried: border-image: linear-gradient(). It looks clean in the CSS, the gradient shows up, and you feel like you’re 30 seconds from done. Then you add border-radius: 12px and the corners snap back to a hard … Read more
The Problem: CGM Apps Are Either Locked Down or Ugly The thing that finally broke me with Dexcom Clarity was discovering that you can export your data — but only as a PDF. Not CSV, not JSON, not anything a developer could actually use. LibreView does offer CSV export, but it’s batched, delayed by up … Read more
The Script That Made Me Look for Something Better The deployment script had been running fine for six weeks. Then one Tuesday morning it silently corrupted a config file on our staging server because a variable I thought was set… wasn’t. The script kept going. No error. No exit. Just a blank value written into … Read more
The Problem: Why Your Incident Timeline Is Lying to You The cruelest irony of on-call: the moment your system is most broken, your monitoring is slowest. I’ve been paged at 2am, fumbled through four different Grafana folders, opened three dashboards that were either stale, wrong service, or loading a 48-hour time range I forgot to … Read more
The Problem: Terraform’s BSL License Change Broke Our Pipeline Planning The BSL switch blindsided a lot of teams because it wasn’t a “you can’t use this anymore” announcement — it was more subtle than that. HashiCorp relicensed Terraform from MPL 2.0 to the Business Source License starting with v1.6, and the specific clause that made … Read more
The Problem: Your Dashboard Lies to You When You Need It Most The dashboard that fails you at 2am is always the one you trusted during business hours. Grafana loads fine when you’re doing capacity planning on a Tuesday afternoon — but the moment your error rate spikes and you actually need it, you’re sitting … Read more
Why I Started Looking for Terraform Alternatives (And You Probably Should Too) The BSL change hit differently than most license drama. In August 2023, HashiCorp moved Terraform from the Mozilla Public License 2.0 to the Business Source License 1.1 — and the key clause is this one: you can’t use Terraform to build a product … Read more
The Setup: Two Semesters, Two Languages, Very Different Pain The thing that surprised me most wasn’t which language students struggled with — it was when they struggled. TAing an intro CS course using Racket, I watched students hit a wall on recursion around week three, then suddenly click and start writing elegant list processors by … Read more
The Problem: Why Gradient Borders Are Annoyingly Hard in CSS The thing that trips up almost everyone is discovering that border-image simply refuses to respect border-radius. This isn’t a browser bug you can work around — it’s specified behavior in CSS. Combine border-image with border-radius: 16px and you get sharp corners, every time, in every … Read more