Recent Posts

Sunk Cost Fallacy as a Feature

The other week I came across the concept of Fuben-Eki, which roughly translates as the “benefit of inconvenience”. Initially I thought it sounds like one of those ancient Japanese philosophies that has been tidied up for LinkedIn and eagerly scrolled down to the comments to see the ‘Engagement’ but it is apparently a relatively recent system-design concept. Hiroshi Kawakami described it as looking for benefits that can only be gained through inconvenience: value that sits outside the usual axes of efficiency and functionality.

New Shiny AWS FinOps Toys?

AWS appears to have spent June quietly scattering new FinOps-shaped features around the place. Some are immediately useful, some are probably worth a exploratory look, and some are AI-flavoured that I want to poke them with a stick before declaring them helpful.

¡Hola, soy DORA. Why hasn’t AI improved my metrics?

I’m often asked about AI stuff as the rest of my blog might suggest. The world is currently scrambling around for how and where AI best accelerates delivery of software programmes, but I still don’t think there is one solution - similar to what happens when you ask any two people how Jira should be used to be fair.

The Comforting Lie Of SHA Pinning

Update (3 November 2026): GitHub has added workflow dependency lockfiles. I tested the original attack again and wrote up the results in GitHub Actually Fixed SHA Pinning. I Wasn’t Expecting That..

Preparing for Quantum Computers That May or May Not Exist

In my day-to-day life as a Platform Engineer I find I spend an unusual amount of time thinking about identity. Not so much in the philosophical sense. In the much less interesting sense of certificates, tokens, key exchanges, and authentication. Logging in to AWS. Signing API calls. Issuing certificates. Rotating secrets. Establishing tunnels between systems that would rather not trust each other… and everything in between.