Cloud infra. CI/CD pipelines. Legacy cleanup. Monitoring and logging.

Predictable load. Stable routine.

What worked.

EC2 → Kubernetes. Raw YAML → Helm charts. Tangled Terraform → clean modules.

Fixing old systems is where I sharpened the most.

Work was predictable. Free hours went to learning.

Less stress. Easier to last.

What broke, what taught.

Legacy was the biggest pain. Fixes never ended.

Most days went to keeping old systems alive — not building. Plan time to pay it down.

We called it microservices. No service mesh. 40+ ALBs, hand-managed.

More complexity. None of the benefits.

True MSA means teams deploy independently.

We approved every deploy. 2–3 hours per engineer, every week. Wrong order broke things.

Devs coded Rate Limiting and Circuit Breakers by hand. Changing a limit = full redeploy.

"We don't need that." "Overkill." Routing, security, costs — all inefficient.

Google SRE book: keep toil under 50%.

We failed. Days, weeks — tickets and deploys. Motivation drained.

What hurt.

Relationships mattered more than good calls.

Safe options won, not best ones. Certain voices always carried — even with bad ideas.

Two floors merged to cut costs. Construction during work hours. Masks all day. Noise. Dust.

No concern for people. This was the culture.

Culture matters as much as skill.

Software is built by people. Trust and respect beat any tool.