Field notes & postmortems
Write-ups from building and operating real systems: mostly the parts that broke, and why. Plus hackathons: what I built against the clock, and what it taught me.
Ghost data: auditing deletions overnight at HackerRank
HackerRank Orchestrate: October Edition · HackerRank
HackerRank Orchestrate, October edition. An agent that proves whether a user's data is really gone, where plain code makes every decision and Claude only reads what code can't.
I let agents run my job hunt
Two scheduled agents find roles, a third writes the outreach. What I automated and what I didn't.
An IT agent that's allowed to say no
Agents That Act Hackathon · TrueFoundry × Polaris
Agents That Act (TrueFoundry × Polaris). A zero-trust onboarding agent that provisions and revokes real accounts, with a human gate before anything irreversible.
FinGuard: reviewing payment code at AIM Code Kitchen
AIM Code Kitchen Season 01 · Google Cloud
Google Cloud's AIM Code Kitchen S01, Track 1. A code reviewer for payment systems where deterministic AST rules run first and Gemini runs second.
The alert that never fired
Our failure alerts looked fine for months. They just couldn't count past one worker.