Field notes
Writing from production.
War stories, IaC opinions, post-mortems, and the lessons that only seem obvious once production makes them expensive.
When 30 Google Workspace accounts picked up hidden email aliases overnight.
A persistence-by-alias pattern that hides in plain sight in the Google Workspace admin console, and the Admin SDK Apps Script that cleaned it up in under a minute.
Open noteThings that bit me when staging and prod "shared just one small thing."
A field guide to the environment-isolation failures that show up six months into a Terraform rollout, from shared secrets to DNS drift.
Open noteWhen Terraform isn't the answer.
Pulumi, CDK, Ansible, plain shell — and the project shapes where Terraform is actually the wrong pick. A working taxonomy for picking the right IaC tool.
Open note