On-call fatigue and the case for rest
Pagers do not care about duty time limits — what aviation rest rules taught me about sustainable on-call rotations and tired humans making tired mistakes.
Topic: Personal
13 posts on this topic.
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Resource requests, limits, and honest capacity
Kubernetes schedules on promises and kills on limits — why copying YAML from a tutorial is not a sizing strategy, and what I do instead.
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What flying taught me about broken deploys
A personal note on habits from the cockpit that still show up when a cluster misbehaves.
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Degraded mode and the minimum equipment list mindset in Kubernetes
You don't need every system green to operate safely — you need to know what's deferred, what's compensating, and when to stop.
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Alert fatigue and the discipline of cockpit radio
When every ping is an emergency, none of them are — what aviation radio habits taught me about paging on-call engineers.
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Staging environments are flight simulator training, not a second airport
Why a staging cluster earns its keep when you treat it like recurrent training — not a cheaper copy of production you never fly.
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Aborting a deploy is a go-around, not a failure
Rolling back or stopping a release mid-flight is a trained maneuver — not an admission that the team is bad at their jobs.
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Cross-checking config before you apply
Two-person review and a preflight checklist mindset for kubectl, Helm, and GitOps — borrowed from aviation, adapted for YAML.
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Capacity planning as fuel reserves
Running a cluster at 100% utilisation is like planning a flight with zero alternate fuel — workable on paper until the weather shifts.
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Learning Kubernetes after aviation
Notes from a Lufthansa pilot who started over in DevOps — no shortcut story, just what actually helped.
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Crew resource management on incident bridges
Who speaks, who listens, who decides — lessons from the cockpit for noisy war rooms.
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Sterile cockpit rules for production changes
Below ten thousand feet, pilots limit conversation to essentials — production deserves the same focus when the blast radius is real.
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Why I write runbooks like flight manuals
Procedures don't replace thinking — but they buy you time when the adrenaline kicks in.