Long-form answers to long-tail questions, each with a worked example and a short FAQ.
Three numbers, one owner, one decision: the cost report that survives past the first meeting.
2026-10-02 · practice
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One command, tested, timed: the rollback shape that works when judgment is at its worst.
Never yours, never in code: the rotation, scoping and drill routine for credentials on someone else's systems.
Three SLIs, honest thresholds, and a report someone reads: the smallest SLO set worth keeping.
Answer quality you can trend: the question set, the rubric, and the weekly habit that keeps assistants honest.
When the code must run on their metal: images, registries, and the handover that survives their data center.
Least privilege for non-humans: scopes, approvals and audit trails for every tool an agent can touch.
Five check families, quarantine discipline, and the weekly report that keeps dirty data from becoming wrong decisions.
Signatures, retries and silent drops: the ordered checklist for webhook failures at customer sites.
A demo pipeline that survives questions: fixtures with dirt, quarantine with reasons, and a report the owner can read.
Start with retrieval, earn the right to train: the decision path for assistants over customer documents.
2026-10-02 · comparison
Drafting gets faster; judgment gets more valuable. Where assistants help inside customer work and where they never decide.
No honest answer picks one side only. What each signal proves, what each misses, and how to combine them.
Security reviews and green fields: how the same role changes shape between enterprise corridors and startup rooms.
How close to the customer is close enough? Roadmaps, feedback loops, and who sits in the room.
Recommendations end in slides. FDE work ends in a system the customer runs without you.
Both keep production alive. One owns the platform, the other owns the customer outcome that runs on it.
Demos that sell versus systems that stay: the handoff between presales craft and delivery ownership.
Diagrams versus running systems: where the architect role ends, where FDE delivery starts, and how to choose.
Same craft, different seat: product-team depth versus customer-site delivery, and the honest signals for which one fits you.
The runbook test is simple: a stranger recovers the system without calling you. How to write to that bar.
2026-10-02 · method
Security review, frozen Fridays, and the Tuesday 2am window: planning delivery around constraints instead of fighting them.
The 30-minute readout that renews contracts: shipped, measured, broken, next, in that order, with numbers.
Shipped lines versus changed weeks: picking the metric the customer would defend, and reviewing it on a date.
The six-line handover: what it does, how it fails, how to tell, what to do, who owns it, where the recording is.
The customer knows the pain, not the project. Techniques for drafting scope they can react to instead of asking them to write it.
The six-stage loop every engagement runs: discover, frame, build, ship, operate, hand over, with the artifact each stage owes.
From 'make it better' to given-when-then: the translation technique that ends scope arguments before they start.
The brief is the contract before the contract: scope, success metric, and what is explicitly out, on a single page.
How to run a discovery interview that ends in a measurable problem statement: questions, traps, and the write-back habit.
Field work from home: what stays, what breaks, and the operating cadence that keeps remote delivery honest.
2026-10-02 · role
The three interfaces that make or break field work: what sales needs, what product needs, and what the FDE owes both.
The minimum viable skill set for a junior FDE seat, how to self-score, and what to build for each gap.
Support engineers already own incidents and customers; here is how to convert that into delivery evidence in six months.
Five builds that map to real FDE work, what each one must contain, and the README habit that reads senior.
An honest fit check: who thrives in FDE work, who burns out, and what the path compounds into over five years.
The questions that actually appear in FDE loops, what each one scores, and how a strong answer is shaped.
No invented numbers: what moves FDE compensation up or down, and how to read any range you see honestly.
A realistic 2027 path into FDE work: the skills that matter, the portfolio that proves them, and the order to build them in.
A plain account of FDE daily work: discovery, building with the customer, production delivery and handover.
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