Welcome: what to expect from this blog

I have spent more than a decade running technology and a 24-hour control room for a telematics business in Dar es Salaam. Most of that work happens out of sight: a report that arrives on time, a device problem caught before the customer calls, a telecom bill that is smaller than last year’s. This blog is where I write that work down.

The site’s headline is the short version: less manual work, fewer outages, smaller bills. This first post explains what that means in practice, so you can decide whether it is worth your time.

What I will write about#

Four themes, all from work I actually do:

• Monitoring. How to know something is broken before the people who depend on it do. Which checks are worth having, which alerts people learn to ignore, and how a control room that never closes stays sane.
• Automation. Reports, reconciliations and checks that used to take hours by hand and now run on their own. Mostly Python and Rust, sometimes with a small machine-learning model behind it, and always with a person reviewing the result before anything important goes out.
• Cost. Telecom contracts, cloud bills and licences. Where the money goes, how to find the line items nobody reads, and how to spend less without making the system worse.
• Running a team around the clock. Shifts, handovers, runbooks, and the habits that let ordinary people handle unusual nights.

Now and then I will also write about the tools I build for myself, including this site.

How the articles are written#

Specifics over theory. I will say what I tried, what it cost, what broke, and whether I would do it again. If something failed, that goes in too: the failures are usually the useful part.

Written for real constraints. I work in Tanzania, where bandwidth is metered, budgets are tight and the power is not always on. Solutions that only work with unlimited money and a perfect network do not survive here, so you will not find many of them on this blog.

Honest about confidentiality. My day job involves customer data. I will never publish a client’s name or anything that could identify one. Where an example comes from work, the details are changed or the data is synthetic, and I will say so.

Not a sales pitch. I am not selling consulting, a course or a product. If I recommend a tool, it is because I use it, and I will mention any connection I have to it.

What this site will not do to you#

The site follows the same rules I write about:

• No ads, no tracking cookies. Visits are counted with GoatCounter, which does not use cookies or follow you across sites.
• Small pages. Text uses your device’s own fonts, images are sized for the screen you have, and every article reads fine without JavaScript. Pages should load quickly on a slow mobile connection.
• Comments only when you ask. The comment section below each article loads nothing from a third party until you choose to open it. Posting a comment needs a GitHub account.

The details are in the privacy page, and the About page has more on who I am and how the site is built.

How to follow along#

• Email. Subscribe and you will get new articles by email. You confirm by clicking a link, and every message has an unsubscribe link.
• RSS. Point any feed reader at the feed. No account needed.
• Talk to me. Use the comments below, or the contact page for anything private. I am particularly interested in what you would like me to write about: if you run systems on a small budget, the problems you are fighting are probably ones I have met too.

Welcome. The next article will be a practical one.