Posts

Building mabel.ink

You cannot CNAME an apex domain Why www took one record and the apex took three, and what MX records have to do with it. July 23, 2026
My staging environment wasn't protecting anything I built a staging environment, then used it in a way that gave me none of its benefit. July 23, 2026
Four times I was wrong about what I was looking at Four debugging sessions where the system was fine and my reading of it was not. July 23, 2026
Trust stores are not one thing Chrome trusted my new certificate authority and Firefox did not, because a machine has more than one idea of what it trusts. July 22, 2026
A green build that deployed nothing A CI job that succeeded, logged the right files, and wrote nothing to the host for hours. July 22, 2026

The thing I forgot to gitignore wasn't a secret My gitignore blocked every credential and missed the file that maps where my network is weakest. July 23, 2026
My home lab is many compose files, not one Why one compose file per service beats one big one, and the shared network that makes it work. July 22, 2026
Containerizing your DNS is a special kind of scary DNS has no graceful degradation, which changes how you plan a thirty second outage. July 22, 2026
Reversible cutovers, or how to containerize a service you are still using Five rules for containerizing a service people are actively using, without breaking it. July 20, 2026
Backups that are actually consistent Four services, four different answers to the question of what makes a backup restorable. July 20, 2026

Ethics One moral framework per week, and the gap between a factual finding and deciding what to do about it. July 21, 2026
Database Concepts The full database lifecycle on one dataset, from entity modeling to normalization to SQL querying. July 21, 2026
Windows Administration Windows Server administration, with failover clustering and high availability as the genuinely new material. May 31, 2026
Software Development Concepts (C#) An introduction to C# on .NET, seen from someone who already writes a lot of PowerShell. May 31, 2026
Networking Concepts OSI and TCP/IP fundamentals, subnetting, and troubleshooting methodology as a reasoning framework. March 16, 2026
Discrete Mathematics Logic, sets, combinatorics, and graph theory, and where each one shows up in computing. March 16, 2026
Communicating Professionalism Professional communication for IT work, and why so much of sysadmin work is a translation problem. February 18, 2026
Cloud Infrastructure Administration AWS and Azure administration, ending in a full multi tier migration plan. January 12, 2026
College Algebra A general education math requirement, and the parts of it that actually turn up in technical work. December 16, 2025
Introduction to Cloud Computing A survey of cloud service models and virtualization, with hands on Windows Server and Hyper-V labs. November 9, 2025