fl@latini.dev:~/posts$ ls -t --human --sort=time
posts=23 total_read=~199 min range=2022-2026
# Your Cloud Bill Is Not a Finance Problem
Cloud cost is a feedback problem, not an accounting one. The invoice arrives monthly, aggregated, weeks late, addressed to someone who cannot change a line of it - while the people who chose the instance size never see a number at all. How to make cost a platform capability: attribution as a paved-road default, unit cost instead of total spend, cheap defaults, and showback before chargeback.
# Your Security Policy Needs a Paved Road
Secrets management and policy-as-code fail in a specific way: the platform team ships the rule without shipping the road that satisfies it. A rule without a road is a tax on developers, and taxes get evaded. How to turn security controls into paved capabilities - workload identity instead of distributed secrets, observe-warn-enforce rollouts, and exceptions that expire.
# Build vs Buy Is the Wrong Question
The platform build-vs-buy spreadsheet almost always lies, because it compares the sticker price of a license against the sticker price of construction and forgets that a thing you build is a thing you operate forever. The real decision isn't build or buy - it's where you draw the line. Buy the undifferentiated substrate, build only the thin layer of opinion that is actually yours, and fund the result like a product, not a project.
# The Error Budget Nobody Spends
An SLO is only a reliability practice if the error budget under it is a decision you actually make. Most teams set a target from ambition, measure the wrong thing, and never change a single plan when the budget runs out. How to pick a target with slack, measure it on the user's journey, and write the policy that makes a blown budget mean something.
# The Real Project Was Never the App
NutriFinder is the friendly face, but the real project sits one layer down: OSDb, the Open Supplements Database - an open, normalised reference for sports-nutrition and supplement data, refreshed by an LLM-powered Playwright pipeline and heading toward a public API anyone can build on.
# Golden Paths, Part 2: The Second and Third Path
The first golden path is an adoption project. The second and third are a portfolio problem, and the dangers invert: sprawl, forked templates, and a platform team that says yes to everything. How to pick the next road, reuse the first one's guts, and keep the paved-road count honest.
# The Product I Wish Existed When I Started Racing
I built NutriFinder, a neutral place to browse and compare endurance-sports nutrition on the numbers that actually matter - carbs, sodium, caffeine, price per portion - instead of on brand marketing. What it is, why it exists, and the open-data idea underneath it.
# Team Topologies in Practice
Everyone adopts the four team types from Team Topologies and ignores the three interaction modes, where the whole value lives. How to organise a platform team around cognitive load instead of the org chart.
# The Comparison That Refuses to Compare
The hard part of building a 'compare two athletes' feature was not the chart. It was the honesty: a rank only means something inside its own cohort, so the feature refuses to crown a winner unless the two actually competed in the same field. A field note on software that says 'I don't know' out loud, from inpedana.com.
# DORA Metrics Without the Dashboard Theatre
The four DORA metrics are a thermometer, not a treatment. Most teams chart them, watch the lines go up, and change nothing about how software actually ships. How to read each metric honestly, the four ways teams game them, and the one question that tells a real DORA practice apart from a vanity dashboard.