The resource
Articles & guides
Field notes on building for the cloud and adopting AI without the hype. Written for engineers and the people who lead them.
Your DORA Metrics Can't See Your AI Investment
Developers using agents ship far more, yet DORA metrics barely move. Why your delivery metrics can't see your AI investment — and the three things to instrument before you scale.
Read articleThe Token Bill Is the New Cloud Bill
Consumption-priced coding agents have no natural ceiling, and the variance is what kills budgets. A FinOps-from-day-one playbook so the token bill doesn't ambush you the way the cloud bill once did.
July 8, 2026Foundry vs. Gemini Enterprise: Choosing an Agent Platform Without Betting the Farm
Two rebrands in eight months tell you the abstractions aren't stable yet. Why 'Foundry or Gemini Enterprise?' is the wrong question — and how to get value now while keeping your switching costs low.
July 6, 2026Your Agent Has a Confused Deputy Problem
The scary agent demo is the one that succeeds — using its own credentials, not the user's. Tool poisoning, the confused-deputy problem, and the boring controls that actually shrink the blast radius.
July 3, 2026Who Reviews the Robot's Code?
Coding agents didn't remove work — they moved it from writing to reviewing, the real bottleneck. How to redesign code review for the agent era before your senior engineers drown.
July 1, 2026The Token Bill Nobody Forecasted
Agent cost isn't a bigger chatbot bill — it's a different function driven by fan-out, growing context, retries, and model choice. How to forecast it by tokens-per-completed-task and keep it predictable.
June 29, 2026Your AI Pilot Isn't Failing — Your Scoreboard Is
A VP told me their AI rollout was "a wash." The verdict was wrong — not because the tools are magic, but because the scoreboard measured the wrong things. Fix the instrument before you judge the pilot.
June 26, 2026Reimbursing AI Subscriptions Is Not a Tooling Strategy
Plenty of engineering orgs think they've solved AI tooling: expense anyone's individual subscription, done. It feels generous and fast. It's also a governance blind spot — you pay every bill and can introspect on none of it. Here's how to actually choose AI tooling for an org, and why the answer is a team or enterprise tier.
June 25, 2026The 90-Day Line: Why Some Teams Ship AI and Others Stall
High performers go from pilot to production in ~90 days. Everyone else takes nine months — with the same tools and models. The 3x gap is change management, not technology. Here's the fast path.
June 24, 2026Stop Writing an AI Policy. Start Running One.
Most leaders ask me how to write an AI policy. It's the wrong first question. The document is the easy part — and while you draft it, two-thirds of your team is already using AI they think you've banned. What you actually need is a standing committee and an operating cadence. Here's how to build both.
June 23, 2026Stop Picking a Model. Pick a Control Plane.
Two smart teams burned three hours debating Gemini vs. Claude — the wrong meeting. In 2026 the durable enterprise AI decision isn't the model, it's the control plane you standardize on.
June 22, 2026You Don't Have to Build AI. You Can Just Call It.
Most leaders picture AI as a project: hire data scientists, collect data, wait two quarters. But a huge share of useful AI isn't built — it's called. Google Cloud exposes a shelf of pretrained AI as plain APIs: speech-to-text and back, document intelligence, entity recognition, translation, image generation. Here are the quick wins you could ship this week.
June 20, 2026A Pragmatic Playbook for AI Adoption
Most AI projects stall not because the models are bad, but because the problem was never scoped for value. Here's a grounded framework for picking, shipping, and measuring AI work.
June 19, 2026You're Behind on AI. Here's How to Start.
A leader I'm working with came back from an industry event rattled — every peer was talking about their AI, and their company had nothing. The panic that produces leads to the worst first move. Here's how to start from zero deliberately: pick one workflow, measure it, and prove the win before you scale.
June 18, 2026Infrastructure as Code That Survives Contact With a Team
IaC promises reproducible infrastructure, then quietly rots into a pile of copy-pasted modules nobody trusts. Here's how to keep Terraform (or its cousins) maintainable as the team and the estate grow.
June 17, 2026Cloud Architecture Without the Over-Engineering
You probably don't need microservices, a service mesh, and multi-region active-active. Here's how to right-size architecture to the problem in front of you.
June 15, 2026FinOps Without a FinOps Team
You don't need a dedicated cost org to stop overpaying for cloud. A handful of habits — ownership, visibility, and a few right-sizing reflexes — recover most of the waste.
June 12, 2026How to Evaluate LLMs for Production
Benchmarks won't tell you if a model works for your task. Build a task-specific eval that reflects your real inputs, your real failure costs, and your real users.
June 10, 2026Serverless or Containers? A Decision, Not a Religion
The serverless-versus-containers debate generates more heat than light. Skip the tribalism — here's a concrete way to decide based on your workload, team, and constraints.
June 8, 2026Reach for Retrieval Before You Reach for Fine-Tuning
When an LLM doesn't know your domain, fine-tuning feels like the obvious fix. Usually it's the expensive one. Here's why retrieval should be your first move — and when fine-tuning actually earns its keep.
June 5, 2026Cloud on a Shoestring: A Bootstrapped Startup's GCP Playbook
For a bootstrapped startup, the cloud gives you data-center-grade infrastructure — and can quietly eat your runway faster than payroll. Here's how to stretch every dollar on Google Cloud: free credits, spot VMs, serverless that scales to zero, and spend alerts so a bill never ambushes you.
June 3, 2026Why I Build Startup Teams With Nearshore Talent in Argentina and Brazil
The highest-return decision I've watched founders make isn't a tool or a framework — it's where they hire. Nearshore engineers in Latin America, and Argentina and Brazil especially, have been extraordinary: brilliant, great communicators, and the kind of leverage that lets a small company move like a big one while protecting its runway.
June 1, 2026The Goldwater dispatch
No-hype cloud & AI, in your inbox.
New articles land Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Get them delivered — no spam, unsubscribe anytime.