About
A field guide to running what you built.
AI will write you a working app in an afternoon. What it will not do is tell you which of these 111 things you now need to understand, and which you can safely ignore forever.
Who this is for
Someone who can ship. You have built something real, possibly with a lot of help from a model, and it works. Now it has users, or a bill, or an outage, and you are running into a vocabulary that assumes you already spent five years in an infrastructure team.
Every entry assumes you are smart and busy, and that nobody has explained this to you before. There are no prerequisites and there is no ladder to climb. Read the four that are biting you this week and ignore the rest until they matter.
How each entry is written
Every one follows the same shape, so you can skim it in the same order every time:
- A concrete scene where the thing actually bites, with real numbers
- What it actually is, in plain language
- When you need it
- When you do not
- What to do about it, as specific actions
The fourth section is the one that matters most. A great deal of infrastructure writing is quietly selling you complexity you do not need yet. Several of the concepts here are actively wrong for a small application, and where that is true, the entry says so.
Publishing schedule
Four entries a week, Monday to Thursday, until all 111 are out. The full list is published from day one with release dates against the unwritten ones, so you can see the whole shape of the subject before it is finished. Nothing is behind an email address. There is an RSS feed if you want them as they land.
Corrections
These are short by design, which means every entry leaves something out. If one of them is wrong rather than merely brief, that is worth fixing, and the entries are revised in place rather than quietly left standing.