Field notes
Field notes on data platforms, database lifecycle, distributed systems, production agentic AI, pipeline reliability, and self-hosted infrastructure.
Build Trino 483 on Iceberg with Apache Polaris as the REST catalog, then prove the vended S3 credentials cannot read the table next door.
~45 min to a working stack; the credential-vending section is the part that takes the time
Build a medallion pipeline with dbt-trino on Iceberg, orchestrate it with Airflow 3, and find the partition spec dbt accepts and discards without a warning.
~40 min, most of it waiting on two container builds
Measure what compaction buys on a small-files partition, then delete 909,968 rows and get them back — and find where the safety net stops.
~25 min, and the rollback itself takes under a second
Attach StarRocks to the same Polaris REST catalog Trino writes through, measure both on identical data, and check for standing S3 keys.
~20 min, mostly waiting for the StarRocks backend to register
Scrape to bronze, silver, gold on Spark 4 and Delta, embed into Chroma, and serve answers that cite their sources or decline to answer.
~1 h, most of it pulling images and the first Ivy resolution
Wire pgBackRest into a running Patroni cluster over mutual TLS with Ansible, then prove it: full backup, replica rebuilt from the repo, and a point-in-time restore.
~90 min on an existing cluster; the restore drill itself is ~15 min
Build a two-node Patroni cluster on Rocky 8 under QEMU, then SIGKILL the leader and measure the promotion, the timeline bump, and the pg_rewind rejoin.
~2–3 h first bring-up (TCG is slow); ~5 min for the failover itself
Stand up a dedicated pgBackRest TLS repo host on generic/rhel8 with Ansible-issued certs, then prove server-ping and mTLS from a client VM.
~90 min first bring-up (TCG + dnf)
Apple Silicon labs that boot still fail host and mesh ping when you use aarch64 boxes or park the VMs on your Wi‑Fi subnet.
~60–90 min first bring-up (TCG is slow)
A practical operating model for reliable data and AI products: consumer-facing promises, typed decisions, idempotency, provenance, and repair.
10 min read
The mount point moved in the PG 18 image, so every compose file copied from a 12–17 guide breaks. The corrected file, then replication, promotion and PITR.
~35 min hands-on
Three ScyllaDB behaviors that make a perfectly valid snapshot restore return zero rows, with the repro, the fix, and the AIO limit that stops node three.
~40 min hands-on
Want a free mailbox for your domain? Run Stalwart on Docker, skip ACME when 443 is taken, publish SPF/DKIM/DMARC, and prove a Gmail round-trip.
~60 min hands-on
Six database engines, eight failover scenarios, one 8-CPU Docker rig. The results matrix, the headline measurements, and how to run the first scenario.
~45 min hands-on
Want a free VPN you actually control? Pin wg-easy to :15, mount /lib/modules, keep the UI off 80/443, and prove traffic exits from your VPS.
~25 min hands-on
Want a free private remote desktop? Self-host RustDesk on Docker, open UDP 21116, pin the key, and keep sessions past the public cutoff.
~30 min hands-on
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