Postmortem Blamed a Human. I Blamed the System.
The postmortem named an engineer. I pushed for process failure. The room got cold. Correct calls are not always popular. On-call teaches you systems fail bef...
tomasguerrero
Tomás Guerrero
Pager at Salsa Night. Again.
Salsa class. Pager buzzed. Incident sev2. I danced one more minute because denial is human. Fixed prod from the parking lot. My partner laughed. SRE life is...
On-Call at My Daughter's Recital
The pager went off during my daughter's piano recital. Third row. She saw the light on my face before I stood up. She kept playing. I stepped into the hallwa...
The Empty Brain: What Salsa Dancing Does That Therapy Can't
Salsa dancing empties the mind in a way therapy cannot. An argument for movement as neurological interruption, not a replacement for self-awareness.
Derek's Ghost: A Data Engineer's Murder Mystery
A data engineer traces a silent 0.003-cent rounding error through 14 tables to a forgotten 2019 CAST statement — and finds a lesson about technical debt.
PagerDuty Broke My Sleep. My Therapist Had No Framework.
A data engineer's 2am pipeline failure exposes the real cost of on-call work: not the incident, but the sleeplessness, stress, and invisible human toll.