vol. XXXIX · harbor edition friday, september 18, 2026 wx: overcast, high humidity, 100% chance of a headache
The Gull Post
all the lights fit to keep · delivered by seabird, payment expected on the spot · price: one flare
The Light List The Journal The Wandering Chart Harbor Contact
the light list · no. 002 · flagship
Monolith Drives Keeper Crazy, Sleepless Nights
A publishing stack that could take up to 15 minutes to publish a story, refactored into a publishing stack that took seconds. Mostly so I could get some sleep.
By the Keeper reporting from inside the cluster · est. 2024, ongoing
Moral: remember to take a vacation
continued in the full log → page 002
Un-monolithing the Post-Gazette
by the numbers
ownership design to operations, solo
outcome 5 minute publishes to a few seconds
scope 29 microservices + infrastructure
from the keeper's journal Agile and meetings jul 2026 · holy hell argsea.com v1 jul 2026 · react react react
notices · the current watch
The keeper is presently wrangling the ArcXP migration (in flight, no page yet), logging in the journal, and tinkering with guitar!. The light remains lit. The lighthouse cat was unavailable for comment.
classified · hobbies
DRAWING, adrift. I drew a box · PIANO, marooned. Noise · MUSIC THEORY, marooned. · GAME DEVELOPMENT, marooned. · RUNNING, bearing smudged.
the full wandering chart →
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argsea /ˈɑːrɡ·siː/ · noun 1. the Argo! on the sea. 2. argc, C++. 3. a sea of water, or of stars. 4. informal -- what a method signature becomes if I'm not supervised.
the light list · no. 004 · est. 2026
AI Takes Over. Keeper Lost at Sea
AI Agent Control Plane (Meta Repo)
The control plane, pictured, running the whole loop while the keeper is out at sea. It would like you to know main is still protected and it wouldn't have it any other way.
An artificial intelligence assumed control of newsroom operations late Thursday and, by all accounts, the paper came out better. In a single shift the system provisioned 150 authors, moved a 899,000-story archive toward its new home, shipped a working tool from an empty folder, and dispatched the tedious parts to a cheaper model without being asked twice. "We were going to run a correction," an editor said. "There was nothing to correct."
the robots don't win. The instructions do. (And yeah, one of us wrote that too.)
see the light →
the light list · no. 006 · est. 2026
Kubernetes to ArcXP Migration
Kubernetes to ArcXP Migration

It was joy all around when the PG was saved. Fans chucked their e-editions in the air; parents named their children after the new owners; there was almost world peace.

Only problem: the cluster I spent a year and a half building and refining wasn't going to make the cut. Our new owners already had a platform, and it made more sense to migrate there so we had shared infra.

Articles, images, videos, e-edition pdfs, author info; it all needed to migrate, and I was the only person at the PG who knew where all of this data sat, so I had my work cut out for me.

What I learned: sharing. Max, Bruno and I wrote the plan and split the work, and even during a two week bereavement period, everything moved along according to plan, with or without me. Nothing I've built before has done that.

Moral: plan for your own absence
see the light →
the gull post · printed at the lighthouse corrections are logged in the journal, where they belong back to the standing edition →