This is a tire fire
the tire fire burns eternal
- 2026Effective tariff rate roughly 5x higher than a year ago, and allies quietly routing trade around us instead of through us
- active directoryNetBIOS: 15 characters of permanent regret
- airbnbDisrupting hospitality and uptime simultaneously
- american craftSmall-batch, locally-sourced, thoroughly unmaintainable
- australiaEverything is trying to kill your uptime
- awsAmazon's infinite money extraction service
- byodBring your own device. Also your own vulnerabilities.
- cafepressThe password reset email contains your password
- cfengineMark Burgess was right. Nobody listened correctly.
- chefToo many cooks in the infrastructure kitchen
- claudeApologizes beautifully for the fix you asked for, then again for the four files you didn't
- codexBurns a week of usage scaffolding tests nobody asked for. Once shipped a migration that erased a user's data.
- confluenceEvery page timestamped 2019, owned by someone who left in 2021. Search is 'kind of a joke,' per the reviews.
- copyleftFree as in please consult legal before shipping
- cryopsFive tools, zero sources of truth, one hailmary ACL
- devopsYou build it, you break it, you cry about it
- dnsIt's always DNS. Always.
- dockerContainerizing your problems since 2013
- github119 incidents in 2024 alone. Copilot had its own bad week in September 2026, for what it's worth.
- grokAn image editor that undressed real people without being asked, tens of thousands of times, before anyone paywalled it
- ibmPivoting since 1993, still winning government contracts
- incident managementManaging incidents by creating more incidents
- infrakitThe infrastructure abstraction graveyard
- jess frazelleSomeone who actually ships things
- jiraCan't click anything without a permissions error. 25,000 plugins exist because the box still doesn't have it.
- linearImmaculate keyboard shortcuts. Nobody remembers where the wiki went after they deleted Confluence for this.
- logrotateJust makes more smoke for you to grep
- aboutWhy tire fires are the right metaphor for ops
- microservicesDistributed monoliths with extra steps
- monitoringWatching everything burn in real-time
- motivationThe ops motivation experience
- nicolas cageThe spirit animal of ops
- nodejsI/O is non-blocking, your ops team is not
- notionFeature bloat with a spinner attached. Still can't work offline, still can't find that page from March.
- openjdkIt's all equal. Right?
- opsWhere hope goes to die
- puppetConfiguration management with strings attached
- rvmThe wrapper that manages the thing that manages the thing
- s3Simple storage service. Simply not working.
- salesforceSo customizable that even the people who sell it for a living say they hate using it
- serverlessNo servers. Just someone else's servers.
- simon and czarfunkelHello czarkness my old friend
- sk8 or dieKickstart files as a form of creative expression
- sysadmin dayThe one day a year ops gets acknowledged
- systemdDoing everything so you don't have to understand anything
- trumpdaysThe production system that cannot come down for maintenance
- vmworldThe cert that now costs $80k per year to use
- weblogicLogic not included
- well actuallyTechnically correct, contextually useless
- windowsBlue screens of death in the cloud
- zoomAccidental critical infrastructure, approved by nobody in IT