Stories the data in this site tells
Most articles here answer a question. A few do something else: they put other articles in an order that argues something none of them says alone. A category list sorts by subject, and these are sorted by argument, so this is the only page where they appear together.
9 of them, grouped by what they argue.
How things break, and what to decide first
The failure cases sorted by where the fault actually lived, the interval between someone knowing and everyone knowing, and the five practices those cases argue for. The first two collect the evidence; the third is what to do about it.
- How systems fail: a reader's map to the cases in this catalogue
Nine failures, sorted not by industry or decade but by where the failure actually lived - in a safeguard someone removed, an assumption that expired, a rollback, a boundary between two organisations, a decision about what to say.
Read the argument → - Decided in advance: the five practices the failures argue for
Two companion pages collect what broke and what got said.
Read the argument → - The disclosure record: what happened between finding it and saying it
Every case in this catalogue has an interval in it - between the moment someone knew and the moment anyone else did.
Read the argument →
One thing, followed end to end
A request, a service, an answer and a format, each traced through articles that were written to stand alone. Read in sequence they describe a path rather than a topic.
- F5 Distributed Cloud: one request, end to end
Sixteen articles on F5 Distributed Cloud, read in the order a request meets them: how a site joins the fabric, where the request lands, which route it takes, where it is sent, how it is encrypted, whether it is allowed, how much of it is tolerated, what it may call, what it leaves behind, and what is silently wrong with the configuration that handled it.
Read the argument → - Extreme Fabric Connect: one service, edge to edge
Ten articles on Extreme's fabric, read in the order a service comes into existence: which operating system, what the words mean, what the fabric is, how the nodes know each other, how a service rides the backbone, why multicast needs no configuration, how the edge asks for what it needs, and how the edge is dual-homed without spanning tree.
Read the argument → - Reading a DNS answer: the line you skipped is the diagnosis
A DNS answer printed by dig or nslookup is the whole reply message: a header with flags and a response code, the question, an OPT pseudo-record and up to three sections of records, of which the address is one line.
Read the argument → - The formats in between: why every interchange bug is the same bug
JSON, YAML, XML, timestamps, text encodings, base64, URLs, diffs.
Read the argument →
The industry and the country
Where the subject is not the technology but the business around it, and the place it was learned in.
- The industry, from inside: six articles on how this business actually works
Who founds the companies, how a product travels from the people who build it to the people who depend on it, what the role in the middle of that path does all day, what a customer is really buying when they buy transformation, and what every appliance on the estate is running underneath.
Read the argument → - The Brazil thread: six articles that only make sense together
A market reserve that produced clones and smuggling, a governance model that was multistakeholder before the word existed, a hacker culture that began in a social-justice NGO, a criminal industry shaped to payment instruments no other country had, a data protection law with ten legal bases and a three-day clock, and the fortnight a supreme court stopped.
Read the argument →
Each one is an ordinary article and can be read on its own. What makes it a story is that it was written to be read after the pieces it points at, or instead of hunting for them.