{
  "version": "https://jsonfeed.org/version/1.1",
  "title": "Arron Pitman — Systems Engineering",
  "home_page_url": "https://arronpitman.com/",
  "feed_url": "https://arronpitman.com/feed.json",
  "description": "Engineering notes from a production-grade homelab: platform, delivery, observability, security and AI-assisted operations.",
  "language": "en-AU",
  "items": [
    {
      "id": "https://arronpitman.com/case-studies/a-wait-that-cannot-silently-fail/",
      "url": "https://arronpitman.com/case-studies/a-wait-that-cannot-silently-fail/",
      "title": "A wait that cannot silently fail",
      "summary": "A monitor watched a file that was never going to exist, and its silence was read as \"still running\" for six hours. The remedy was a rule about what a wait is allowed to be.",
      "tags": [
        "case-studies"
      ]
    },
    {
      "id": "https://arronpitman.com/case-studies/queue-time-is-a-ci-pools-latency/",
      "url": "https://arronpitman.com/case-studies/queue-time-is-a-ci-pools-latency/",
      "title": "Queue time is a CI pool's latency",
      "summary": "Sixty per cent of pipeline wall-clock was spent queueing while the agent sat idle 79% of the time. The fix was a second runner — and an SLO that stops the same regression returning invisibly.",
      "tags": [
        "case-studies"
      ]
    },
    {
      "id": "https://arronpitman.com/case-studies/the-alert-that-paged-as-an-emergency/",
      "url": "https://arronpitman.com/case-studies/the-alert-that-paged-as-an-emergency/",
      "title": "The alert that paged as an emergency",
      "summary": "Three alerting surfaces, three severity vocabularies, nothing reconciling them. A low-importance signal carrying an off-taxonomy label did not error — it mis-routed, and paged as an emergency.",
      "tags": [
        "case-studies"
      ]
    },
    {
      "id": "https://arronpitman.com/case-studies/the-gate-that-had-never-been-seen-red/",
      "url": "https://arronpitman.com/case-studies/the-gate-that-had-never-been-seen-red/",
      "title": "The gate that had never been seen red",
      "summary": "Every gate in this estate ships a poisoned fixture and is required to reject it. The rule exists because a gate proven only on clean input is indistinguishable from no gate at all.",
      "tags": [
        "case-studies"
      ]
    },
    {
      "id": "https://arronpitman.com/case-studies/the-map-that-could-not-be-trusted/",
      "url": "https://arronpitman.com/case-studies/the-map-that-could-not-be-trusted/",
      "title": "The map that could not be trusted",
      "summary": "A generated dependency map reported \"no consumers\" for a database six stacks were using, and served it with a healthy 200. The fix was not a better derivation — it was making the render assert its own output before publishing.",
      "tags": [
        "case-studies"
      ]
    },
    {
      "id": "https://arronpitman.com/case-studies/twelve-hours-of-samples-proved-a-port-unused/",
      "url": "https://arronpitman.com/case-studies/twelve-hours-of-samples-proved-a-port-unused/",
      "title": "Twelve hours of samples proved a port unused. It wasn't.",
      "summary": "A census sampled established connections every five minutes and concluded nothing used a port. Closing it instantly broke a fleet of devices that connect for under a second, once a minute.",
      "tags": [
        "case-studies"
      ]
    },
    {
      "id": "https://arronpitman.com/pillars/ai-assisted-operations/",
      "url": "https://arronpitman.com/pillars/ai-assisted-operations/",
      "title": "AI-assisted operations",
      "summary": "An agent operates this estate under a written authority envelope, retrieves what it knows from the same corpus this site publishes, and carries a named taxonomy of the ways it has fooled itself — loaded before the work, not written up after it.",
      "tags": [
        "pillars"
      ]
    },
    {
      "id": "https://arronpitman.com/pillars/delivery-and-gitops/",
      "url": "https://arronpitman.com/pillars/delivery-and-gitops/",
      "title": "Delivery and GitOps",
      "summary": "Ninety-nine pipelines on a self-hosted pool, a change that reaches production in six minutes, and the reason a green pre-push hook is the most convincing counterfeit in the estate.",
      "tags": [
        "pillars"
      ]
    },
    {
      "id": "https://arronpitman.com/pillars/observability-and-sre/",
      "url": "https://arronpitman.com/pillars/observability-and-sre/",
      "title": "Observability and SRE",
      "summary": "Metrics, logs and blackbox probes on a RED+USE baseline, one dashboard per service generated as code, and alerting designed around a constraint most estates do not have — nothing may ever wake the operator.",
      "tags": [
        "pillars"
      ]
    },
    {
      "id": "https://arronpitman.com/pillars/platform-and-compute/",
      "url": "https://arronpitman.com/pillars/platform-and-compute/",
      "title": "Platform and compute",
      "summary": "One hypervisor, seventeen guests and a rule that nothing is provisioned by hand — how the substrate is declared, snapshotted before every change, and kept honest by a helper that refuses to lie about whether a rollback point exists.",
      "tags": [
        "pillars"
      ]
    },
    {
      "id": "https://arronpitman.com/pillars/security-and-compliance/",
      "url": "https://arronpitman.com/pillars/security-and-compliance/",
      "title": "Security and compliance",
      "summary": "Zero-trust at the edge with an approval register behind it, SBOMs for the whole fleet, secret scanning with a conformance gate — and two prudential standards run properly rather than claimed.",
      "tags": [
        "pillars"
      ]
    }
  ]
}