Posts
Platform teams aren't DevOps teams with a rebrand
Most orgs rename their DevOps team to “Platform Engineering” and call it a strategy. It isn’t.
The Confluence page gets updated. A roadmap appears with “IDP” somewhere in Q3. The team lead gets a new title. Six months later, developers are still filing tickets to get an environment, and the “platform team” is still the bottleneck for every deployment. Nothing changed except the branding.
This is the rebrand problem. And it’s widespread enough that it’s worth being direct about what actually separates a platform team from a DevOps team that got a new name.
RRE: the weekly reflection framework I built for my team
Engineers care deeply about observability. We instrument systems, build dashboards, define SLOs, and set up alerts. Because a system you can’t see is a system you can’t improve. We’d never run production infrastructure without telemetry.
Then we run teams with no telemetry at all.
No signal on whether the week moved things forward. No structured way to surface blockers early. No feedback loop that converts experience into better execution. Just meetings, Slack noise, and the vague sense that things are either fine or not fine.
One month into management: all theory, no answers yet
I’ve been an engineering manager for about a month. Everything I think I know about this job comes from books, talks, and watching other managers. Not from doing it.
That’s an uncomfortable thing to write. But it’s accurate, and I’d rather be honest about where I’m starting than write a post that performs experience I don’t have.
I’ve had a personal north star for a while that’s shaped why I wanted this role in the first place:
Secrets management is still a mess in 2026
It is 2026. There are .env files committed to private repositories right now. There are passwords in Kubernetes Secret objects encoded as base64, which is not encryption, and someone on that team thinks it is. There are production credentials in a shared Bitwarden folder with twelve people’s access that nobody has audited since the last two people left.
Secrets management is a solved problem in the sense that we know what good looks like. It’s an unsolved problem in the sense that most teams aren’t doing it.
stackd: GitOps for Docker Compose without the Kubernetes tax
stackd is a GitOps daemon for Docker Compose — auto-deploys on Git push, injects secrets via Infisical, no Kubernetes required. Open source, self-hosted.
Simplifying Reverse Proxy Management with Kubernetes Ingress Controller and Cert-Manager
Using Kubernetes Ingress Controller and cert-manager to manage reverse proxies and SSL certificates — including for services running outside the cluster.
Hosting a blog with hugo on Azure - For Free!
Step-by-step guide to hosting a Hugo blog on Azure Static Web Apps for free — from local setup to live deployment with a custom domain and HTTPS.
Maximizing Productivity and Collaboration with Github
How to use GitHub features — repositories, pull requests, Actions, and collaboration workflows — to maximize team productivity and code quality.