That feeling when everything goes wrong and deep down you know it's going downhill from here on out. Document, document and document. I like history but I don't want to do archaeology. hazelweakly.me/blog/mother-...

Mother of All Outages | Hazel Weakly

Y’all ready for a story about one of the wildest fuckups production outages I ever took part in? Buckle up; we’re going for a ride far, far away from any...

hazelweakly.me

If you happen to be in Bangkok next Monday, there's a DeepMind meetup hosted by a local GDG chapter. Info and tickets: gdg.community.dev/events/detai...

Exploring AI with DeepMind: A Community Meetup | Google Developer Groups

In-person Event - Join GDG Bangkok Community Meetup for insights from Google and DeepMind on AI advances, including prototyping and multi-agent systems. Connect with developers, founders, and builders...

gdg.community.dev

Reducing cloud cost is great, but do the same with carbon cost to preserve the balance is more awesome 😎 karnwong.me/posts/2026/0...

GreenOps tools on Kubernetes

Kubernetes is a container orchestrator, which requires a compute. To power a compute unit, you need electricity. Creating electricity can result in carbon emissions, which is bad for the climate...

karnwong.me

Slides for my agent sandbox talk is up: speakerdeck.com/kahnwong/pyt.... I also wrote a post about this at karnwong.me/posts/2026/0....

Python Developer Day 2026 - Demystifying Agent Sandbox

speakerdeck.com

ARM64 compute is cheaper, but there's a catch! karnwong.me/posts/2026/0...

ARM64 can reduce your infra cost - with a catch

Cloud spending can go off the rails, and no one is really happy about this. The finance team is grilling the ops team why the operating cost is very high, and then ops ask the devs to curb the...

karnwong.me

AI can do a lot of things, but it's a probability machine. Just because most people think something is true doesn't make it true. Do your own due diligence, trust but verify. And fundamentals will get you a long way, at least you'll spend significantly less time to pick up new concepts.

Yes, you still need to know fundamentals even with AI

Coding with AI gets stuff done faster. For some areas where I understand how things work but never applied it before, AI can help me realize it, which is great. The rate at which I crank out personal....

karnwong.me

Because having a data platform isn't enough. Even when it can scale well, peopleware is different. It requires different approaches when it comes to managing different team size. Failing this, your system won't be running smoothly, either technical or squishy human realm. dagster.io/blog/introdu...

A Practical Guide to Building Data Platforms That Grow with You

Discover how to design and scale data platforms with clarity and confidence. Learn from real Dagster users and practical examples in our free eBook, Scaling Data Teams.

dagster.io

Replaced my previous o11y stack with Coroot, love it because most features work out of the box. Storage backend is Clickhouse, which means it won't break easily. karnwong.me/posts/2026/0...

Coroot revisited

Discover how Coroot simplifies Kubernetes observability with ClickHouse storage, zero-config flamegraphs, deep Postgres/Redis insights, and automated alerting.

karnwong.me

Proxmox is great for managing VMs, but then you'll have to dedicate a full node to it. There are other solutions, with their own pros and cons. My favorite is Nomad + QEMU, and at least for my workflows it's easier to manage persistence and turn the VMs on/off compared to KubeVirt.

Virtual machines setup for homelab

A practical look at homelab VM setups using KubeVirt, Proxmox, Nomad, and VirTofu.

karnwong.me

Aaaaand this is what happens when the lower stack relies on c. Partly why I find using linux full time easier because I can repro the ci build steps locally without going through emulation on mac.

The C-Shaped Hole in Package Management

System package managers and language package managers are solving different problems that happen to overlap in the middle.

nesbitt.io

Getting an AI-generated reply but from a human who forwarded a question to an AI is quite jarring. I would think it's a bot, but then this is an actual human who I've had prior interactions before. I want to talk to humans, then there are humans pretending to be bots. It's wild.

No Meat Proxy

AI is a tool. You shouldn't be.

nomeatproxy.com

A password alone isn't secure enough to protect your laptop. Disk encryption is the next step. Slight overhead, but you'll sleep better at night.

Password isn't enough to protect your laptop

Why a laptop password isn’t enough—and what disk encryption adds when your device falls into the wrong hands.

karnwong.me

Love using Go, especially Google's A2A framework (at least I like it better than Python SDK - too many magic variables 🥶). Glad to see Microsoft is joining the Go party!

Microsoft joins Google in backing Go for AI agents — OpenAI and Anthropic lag

Go already runs much of the cloud. Now it's the language the biggest AI agent frameworks are racing to support — but two names are missing.

thenewstack.io

It would be unimaginable back then to have a single database driver that can work across multiple runtimes. 2026 is great.

dbc | The package manager for modern database drivers

Install dbc, then use it to install ADBC drivers.

columnar.tech

Now you can use GPU to crunch spatial data!

Just because it's a container doesn't mean attackers can't do damages to your system. It's possible to obtain cloud credentials through a container shell. It's not enough to use containers, you should also harden security. For a start, use distroless image to remove shell access.

Container Escapes 101

Welcome to Container Escapes 101 at the AppSec Village at DEF CON 33!

some-natalie.dev

Using passkeys means I don't have to remember passwords, and it's faster to log in this way! Also great for when you use a dummy profile to log into a video conference app for presentation 👀

Make logging in easier with passkeys

Is traditional 2FA eating up your time? Discover how Passkeys (WebAuthn) let you log in securely without entering a username, password, or OTP code every day, while keeping your online accounts safe.

karnwong.me

Let LLM go wild and you might end up with a giant hole in your system's security, among other bad things that can happen. Run LLM-generated code in a sandbox for better sanity and security 🔒

What are (agent) sandboxes useful for?

Homepage and blog by Karn Wong

karnwong.me

Relationship capital is real, and if used well it can help you do many great things. Don't forget the people.

Going To Dinner

Early in my career, I was really good at getting things done. I was also, I now realize, occasionally leaving a trail of quietly damaged…

medium.com

There's nothing wrong with using AI, but in the end YOU are still the one responsible for its output. The code works doesn't mean it's secure. And AI sometimes use a hacky solution, you gotta be able to catch them!

AI demands more engineering discipline. Not less

If you lived through the shift from handcrafted server pets to immutable infrastructure, you should sense something oddly familiar about what's happening now.

charitydotwtf.substack.com

Gave a talk a while back about vm access. Mostly about common operations and how things can go wrong. This is a generic practice, so even if you're not on Azure it's still applicable.

Global Azure 2026 - Securing VM Access On Azure

speakerdeck.com

I'm not against using LLMs, but I'm not okay with using LLMs to write docs intended for humans. By that point the question will be "is this an actual intention" or "LLM had a go at it".

You can use eBPF in conjunction with OTel! Don't forget to filter out what you don't need, otherwise the storage would balloon up, and there will be too much noise.

Observability with eBPF and OTel

Use eBPF and OpenTelemetry together for zero-code-change auto-instrumentation, combining generic trace capture with fine-grained custom instrumentation.

karnwong.me

Found silken tofu in the fridge. Also an avocado was ready to eat. Yup, cubed them and added shoyu, perfect!

Still a thing in 2026. What Seneca said way back then still ring true today. People never change. I mean they do, but rarely.

Serverless is convenient and I love it, given the right context. In some cases, it can be more expensive than an always-on deployment. But serverless misconfiguration can cost you millions!!! And cautionary tales are in order serverlesshorrors.com

ServerlessHorrors | Home

Stories you never want to feel on your own skin

serverlesshorrors.com

Everyone wants to excel at what they do, but on the other side it's very lonely, especially when they want to vent but there's no one else sharing the same context as them. People want them to stay where they are to solve hard problems. Let's not forget they are also humans too.

Gotta make sure your apps don't have funny security holes. Pentest engineers might not be on the same page as software engineers, and that's normal, they speak different languages. Good news is as long as you are open and try to communicate, things will work out alright. Humans are very resilient.

Why Pentests Break Engineering Workflows

Why pentests disrupt engineering workflows and what a more actionable, engineering-first approach looks like for remediation and security maturity.

softwaresecured.com

I always say OSI Layer 8 is "people"

Environments and People

IF you talk with engineers, software architects, managers, pretty much everyone, the answer will be the same: they are not happy with shared...

diego-pacheco.blogspot.com

Seen my fair share as well, but now I can laugh about it.

From the sre community on Reddit

Explore this post and more from the sre community

reddit.com