Some Nights You Just Show Up

Sun, 18 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Easy save. I could smother it, kill the play. Instead I kick it out to their other forward.

Not a mistake. A choice. I’m bored and my team’s up four goals and I want to make another save. So I manufacture chaos, create my own work, turn an easy night into something that feels like hockey.

That’s the first thirty-six minutes.

The second half, I’m making four saves in a row and watching the fifth one trickle past my pad anyway. My defense is skating like they’re underwater. Passes are dying on sticks. I’m doing everything right and we’re getting shelled.

Here’s the thing about being on-call: some weeks, everything you touch works. You’re rolling back that bad deploy before anyone notices. You’re catching the disk space issue at 87% instead of 99%. You’re so dialed in you start getting cocky, maybe let a minor alert sit an extra minute just to see if it self-heals, because you know you can fix it anyway.

Other weeks, you’re making all the right calls and it doesn’t matter. The primary fails over cleanly and the secondary’s already degraded. You catch the memory leak but the restart triggers a cascade. You did the runbook perfectly and the system finds a new way to fail anyway.

Both are the job.

The dangerous part is thinking the first kind of week means you’re great at this, or the second kind means you’re not. Some nights the puck just goes in. Some nights your coverage is perfect and it still finds the gap. The only consistent thing is that you have to show up.

You can’t manufacture chaos in production the way I do on ice - that’s how you end up in a post-mortem explaining why you thought it would be “fun” to test failover during peak traffic. But you also can’t let the brutal weeks convince you that you’re not doing it right.

The shinny game is rec league hockey at eleven PM with a bunch of tired old men. Nobody’s keeping score except me. The second half, we lost 8-2.

In production, someone’s always keeping score. But the principle holds: some nights you just show up, make the saves you can make, and skate off when it’s done.

The job is to show up anyway.

Everything I learned about Ops, I learned playing goal

Thu, 06 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Well, maybe not everything.

Look, being a goalie is objectively ridiculous. You strap on forty pounds of equipment designed to protect you from frozen rubber traveling at speeds that would make physicists frown. Then you stand in front of a net and dare people to shoot at you. It’s a strange job.

But here’s the thing: being a goalie is basically the same job as running ops, or security, or honestly, any part of software development where you’re the one who has to keep the thing from breaking.

Both jobs share the same core truth that nobody tells you in the job description: when everything’s working, no one notices you’re there. But the second something gets past you? Everyone knows exactly where you were and what you should have done differently.

You spend most of your time reading patterns, anticipating problems before they fully materialize, and communicating with people who may or may not be listening. You’re simultaneously trying to follow the systems that keep you consistent while also staying loose enough to react when something weird happens. Because something weird always happens.

And whether it’s a breakaway in overtime or a production incident at 2 AM, you learn pretty quickly that freezing up isn’t an option. You make the save or you don’t. You stop the breach or you don’t. Then you’ve got about eight seconds to shake it off and get ready for the next shot, because there’s always a next shot.

The bad news? You can’t stop everything. The good news? Neither can anyone else. The job is to be ready anyway.

Operations on Coffee or Blog

Some Nights You Just Show Up

Everything I learned about Ops, I learned playing goal