Forged
Field notes on building systems that hold up under pressure — from software platforms and engineering practices to the ways we work and organise.
Engineering Personal Systems Work & Organisations Resilience Tools & Automation
Selected Writing
-
Building a Personal Cloud · Part 1
I Never Meant to Build a Personal Cloud
8 min readWhat began as a home AI lab became a personal platform for experimentation, self-hosting, learning, and building future capabilities.
-
The runner was easy. The platform was the real engineering
13 min readSelf-hosting a GitHub Actions runner is easy. Turning runners into a secure, scalable, self-service organisational capability is a platform-engineering problem.
-
How judgement, not technical skill, defines a senior engineer
14 min readWhy technical ability is only the foundation of seniority, and sound judgement determines who can be trusted with consequential engineering decisions.
-
Designing a personal learning platform
5 min readWhat if you approached learning like a platform engineer—building a system that makes every future capability easier to acquire?
Latest Posts
-
Securing GitHub Actions in the Enterprise · Part 1
Securing GitHub Actions Is a Hard Problem
10 min readGitHub Actions combines third-party executable code, privileged CI/CD environments and complex event-driven behaviour. Securing it requires far more than pinning versions or restricting the Marketplace.
-
Engineering for outsized impact with small teams
12 min readHow small platform teams use constraints, automation, self-service, reliability, and careful technology choices to create disproportionate organisational impact.
-
The dashboard is not the work
7 min readWhy visible developer activity is a poor substitute for engineering value and system health.
-
Don't steal people's failure
7 min readWhy recoverable failure is essential for developing judgement, capability, and resilient teams.
-
Hidden costs of ownership
10 min readThe obligations, friction, and opportunity costs hidden behind acquiring and keeping things.
-
Design the conditions
11 min readHow our surroundings, defaults, and tools quietly shape the way we think, work, and behave.