How I use the tools, and where teams go wrong
One page per tool. Each has my opinion, real config, the mistakes I had to undo, and the Claude workflow I use with it.
Infrastructure as Code
Terraform
Remote state from day one. Modules as components. A plan a human reads.
Packaging and runtime
Containers & ECS
Config comes in at startup, with no SDK calls at boot. It runs on a laptop with no cloud credentials.
Delivery automation
CI/CD Pipelines
The pipeline decides whether a change is safe. Keep logic in scripts, and keep it under fifteen minutes.
Knowing what production is doing
Observability
Logs, metrics, and traces answer different questions. Structured logs are the prerequisite for letting an agent near an incident.
Glue, tooling, and agents
Python Automation
Most ops work is glue. Make it idempotent, observable, and safe to run twice.
Three rules sit under every runbook
Toil is the enemy. Deploying isn't releasing. A test nobody trusts is worse than no test.