The Hardest Support Job You’ve Never Heard Of When your car breaks down, the mechanic lifts the hood. When your cloud app breaks, your support engineer is standing in the parking lot. Listening through a closed window. Taking notes on the sound. That’s not a metaphor I invented to be dramatic. That’s the actual jobContinue reading “The Hidden Art of Forensic Engineering in Cloud Support”
Category Archives: Uncategorized
How AI’s Future Depends on Data Provenance
The Low-Background Steel Era of AI In my last piece I argued that the internet was never a clean dataset, and that AI is now polluting its own water supply by training on its own exhaust. Several people asked the reasonable follow-up question: so what happens next? Does the whole thing degrade into fluent mush?Continue reading “How AI’s Future Depends on Data Provenance”
How to Challenge AI for Better Insights
A few weeks ago I wrote about a mindset shift that changed how I use AI: I assume it’s wrong until it proves otherwise. That post got a lot of traction, and the most common response was some version of “okay, but how do you actually do that?” Fair question. The mindset is one thing.Continue reading “How to Challenge AI for Better Insights”
Podcast Episode: AI Adoption And Cloud Engineering
Pip: Welcome to Azure Advice — where Christoph Corder has been quietly solving problems that most people are still complaining about in Slack. Mara: This episode covers two stretches of territory: how AI tools actually get adopted — and whether they're trustworthy enough to deserve it — and then the operational side, specifically how AzureContinue reading “Podcast Episode: AI Adoption And Cloud Engineering”
Podcast Episode: Debugging Production Failures
Pip: Welcome to Azure Advice — where the authentication is broken, the memory is leaking, and the connection pool is set to self-destruct every thirty seconds. Christoph Corder has been busy. Mara: He has. Today we're covering authentication failures at the protocol level, memory leaks driven by a cascade of zombie processes, a health checkContinue reading “Podcast Episode: Debugging Production Failures”
Understanding AI’s Data Bias and Model Collapse
There is a quiet problem building at the foundation of modern AI, and it does not get nearly enough attention outside of research circles. It has two parts, and understanding both of them matters whether you are building AI systems, using them, or just trying to figure out how much to trust their output. PartContinue reading “Understanding AI’s Data Bias and Model Collapse”
Common Kerberos Authentication Failures Explained
Authentication failures are a specific kind of frustrating. The application is running. The network is up. The credentials are correct. And yet: access denied. The system is doing exactly what it was told to do — which is precisely the problem. The customer reported a 383ms latency on authentication. There were no errors of anyContinue reading “Common Kerberos Authentication Failures Explained”
Solving Memory Leaks in Azure App Services
41 Zombie Domains and a 10.7GB Memory Dump: Inside a FileSystemWatcher Storm Some cases arrive already on fire. This was one of them. The customer was a customer running a .NET application on Azure App Service. The application was recycling. Not occasionally, continuously. And it was leaking memory at a rate that had produced aContinue reading “Solving Memory Leaks in Azure App Services”
Avoiding Health Check Failures in Java Applications
The 30-Second Misconfiguration That Held a Deployment Hostage There is a special category of production bug that hides in plain sight. It doesn’t crash anything. It doesn’t throw an exception you can grep for. It just quietly prevents your infrastructure from doing what it’s supposed to do, and it waits patiently while you stare atContinue reading “Avoiding Health Check Failures in Java Applications”
Why You Should Challenge AI’s Confidence
When I first started working with AI tools, I was genuinely stunned. The power, the speed, the breadth of what it could do, it felt like someone had handed me a turbocharger for my brain. I dove in headfirst. Then it burned me. Not once. Not twice. AI confidently gave me wrong answers, fabricated references,Continue reading “Why You Should Challenge AI’s Confidence”
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