devops on jwogrady

A rebase keeps every byte and not one commit

Mon, 21 Sep 2026 21:02:54 -0500

A repository had seventeen branches on the server and zero tags. Thirteen tags existed on a laptop and on two older repositories that were due to be retired. Pushing them up was housekeeping — the kind of thing you do because it is free, not because you expect it to matter.

The tags mark catalog snapshots, one per export of a plumbing company’s price book, going back to the earliest known copy at eighty-seven services. Nice to keep. Not urgent.

The config declares seven 410s and the file that serves them does not

Mon, 21 Sep 2026 21:01:19 -0500

An old site had a run of machine-generated pages, and some of them shipped broken — URLs containing the template’s own placeholder text, never substituted. Somebody dealt with those properly. Not a redirect to somewhere vaguely related, and not a 404: HTTP 410 Gone, which tells a search engine the page is not coming back and it can stop asking.

Seven of them. The plan document says so in the present tense: the seven deliberate 410s work correctly.

You already knew. It was in seven repositories.

Mon, 21 Sep 2026 18:10:00 -0500

If you have ever gone looking for something in your own systems and found that past you had already solved it, and written it down, and then forgotten —

that. Except worse, because I published a confident assessment first.

What I said, four hours ago

Asked whether two days of work had proved the thesis, I gave what I thought was a careful answer. Extraction: proven. Production: proven. Distribution and measurement: not started. No analytics, no Search Console, nothing that could tell you whether any of it worked.

It was the keys. It was always the keys.

Sun, 20 Sep 2026 19:20:00 -0500

Last week I spent four days sorting out how we store client passwords and API keys. Four days. On password management — the single least glamorous thing on the board, the kind of task you’d hand to whoever joined most recently.

Best time I’ve spent this year, and it isn’t close.

Here’s why, and I’m going to spell it out because it took me an embarrassing number of years to see it.