The Verdict — Vladimir Mikhalev cover

Podcast

The Verdict

Production-tested analysis — narrated in my own voice.

Container security, AI governance, and platform engineering, tested in production and argued without the hype. Every episode is a full essay from heyvaldemar.com, narrated by Docker Captain Vladimir Mikhalev in his own voice.

  • Docker Captain
  • IBM Champion
  • AWS Community Builder

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Episodes 21

  1. Cyan-lit steel lattice with a red fault inside, mutation testing
    Mutation Testing for Infrastructure Code — 153 Planted Bugs, Four Tests That Could Not Fail

    Sep 27, 2026

    Mutation testing for infrastructure code, done by hand across fifteen repositories. 153 planted bugs, and four green tests that could never have failed.

  2. Cable plugged into itself, red lamp lit, Docker health check
    Docker Health Checks That Cannot Fail — Seventeen Hours Green

    Sep 15, 2026

    A Docker health check whose pattern matches the shell running it can never go red. How to find the checks in your fleet that never failed, and prove each one.

  3. Dark stacked slabs with cyan-lit gaps, watsonx.governance evidence sampling
    watsonx.governance Enforcement Tracking — Sampled Compliance and the Unevidenced Run

    Aug 24, 2026

    EU AI Act Article 12 wants a per-event record. Enforcement Tracking evidences thresholds on a schedule. What that gap costs, and the join key that closes it.

  4. Dark monolithic cube in a deep void, three wide cyan beams pouring into its top while a single thin thread of light escapes from its base beside a small red indicator, a visual metaphor for merge debt, parallel agent work forced through a single landing point
    Merge Debt: The 2026 Bill Your Parallel AI Agents Are Running Up

    Jul 30, 2026

    Three agents finish in parallel. Main takes one landing at a time. METR's perception gap, the rebase tax, and why Merge Debt is the number nobody plots.

  5. Dark datacenter rack aisle with bone-white light and one red status LED
    Terraform MCP server GA: the Apply Gate your auditor will ask about

    Jun 30, 2026

    HashiCorp's Terraform MCP server is GA and IBM Bob can write production IaC. ENABLE_TF_OPERATIONS separates a safe assistant from autonomous apply.

  6. A dark monolithic cube in a deep void, its top edge crumbling into faint falling particles while cooler light holds steady along its lower edges, a visual metaphor for reproducible knowledge depreciating while judgment holds its value
    Your Knowledge Is a Depreciating Asset. Judgment Compounds.

    Jun 16, 2026

    AI made reproducible knowledge free, so technical expertise is now a depreciating asset. Judgment is the one that compounds. Here is how to move your weight.

  7. Dark monolithic cube in a deep teal void, cyan light strands wrapping its top edges and spilling down the sides above a faint crimson glow at its base, a visual metaphor for the quiet senior engineer signal as code quality and trust erode beneath rising velocity
    The Senior Engineer Signal: The 2026 Risk Your Velocity Metrics Hide

    Jun 12, 2026

    Juniors get the biggest boost from AI; seniors trust it least. That split is your earliest read on engineering risk, and on the talent you're about to lose.

  8. Dark monolithic cube floating in deep teal void, cyan light strands wrapping its top while crimson glowing veins escape from its base — visual metaphor for structural risk silently leaking past containment
    Agent Sprawl: The 2026 Engineering Risk Your Auditor Hasn't Named Yet

    Jun 11, 2026

    Unknown numbers of AI coding agents run in parallel — no audit trail, no isolation, no per-team measurement. By 2026 that's an audit finding.

  9. Server rack aisle lit by a single amber signal lamp in a cold datacenter
    Docker supply chain hardening — from Scout D to OpenSSF 7.8 on a 730K-pull image

    Apr 22, 2026

    How I hardened a 1M-pull public Docker image from Scout grade D to OpenSSF Scorecard 7.8 — multi-stage build, cosign, SLSA provenance, non-root default.

  10. Dark server rack aisle with cyan light and red emergency LED
    Cloudflare Web Analytics on Astro — Why Removing GA4 Unlocked Lighthouse 100

    Apr 18, 2026

    How removing Google Analytics 4 from an Astro site unlocked Lighthouse 100, why Cloudflare Web Analytics replaced it, and what the tradeoffs actually cost.