I test what ships and publish what I find, failures included: 100+ public repositories, every restore script run by CI, every finding on the ledger with its rule.
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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.
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Episodes 28
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A Partial Read Is Not a Smaller Fleet: A GitHub API Rate Limit and the Numbers That Lied for an HourA partial read published as the whole. For an hour the profile said 24 restore scripts across 15 repositories, and the fleet had 73 across 48. Three guards now.
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AI-BOM at Admission — The Cluster Refused a Signed Model for Its LicenceAn AI-BOM read at admission. Everything crosses the air gap as one signed file, and a signed model is refused for its licence. CycloneDX, Kyverno, cosign.
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Backups Verified by Restore — Twelve Days of OK Over an Empty ArchiveA backup verified by restore is the only kind that exists. Twelve days of OK over a volume nothing wrote to, and 47 templates' restore scripts CI never ran.
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Prompt Injection Evals — Six Models, One Boundary, Nothing Left the CompanyPrompt injection evals on six small models. They acted on hidden instructions from never to half the time, and zero data left. Gate the boundary.
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AI Agent Governance — One Engineer, Over a Hundred Repositories and the Decisions No Agent MakesAI agent governance for one engineer and 100+ repositories. What the agents decide, what they never do, and the documented auto-merge that merges red checks.
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Restore Drills on a Clean Machine — Measured RTO for 47 Stacks, 19 Seconds to 7 MinutesRestore drills that measure RTO on a machine that never ran the stack, 47 templates weekly. Every same-host restore passed. The first clean one answered 500.
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AI Reviews That Read Nothing — Thirty-Four Verdicts in a HundredA third of the images my fleet pins would have had their next AI review written against nothing. How to prove what an AI review read before anyone acts on it.
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Mutation Testing for Infrastructure Code — 153 Planted Bugs, Four Tests That Could Not FailMutation testing for infrastructure code, done by hand across fifteen repositories. 153 planted bugs, and four green tests that could never have failed.
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Docker Health Checks That Cannot Fail — Seventeen Hours GreenA 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.
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watsonx.governance Enforcement Tracking — Sampled Compliance and the Unevidenced RunEU 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.
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Merge Debt: The 2026 Bill Your Parallel AI Agents Are Running UpThree 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.
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Terraform MCP server GA: the Apply Gate your auditor will ask aboutHashiCorp's Terraform MCP server is GA and IBM Bob can write production IaC. ENABLE_TF_OPERATIONS separates a safe assistant from autonomous apply.
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Your Knowledge Is a Depreciating Asset. Judgment Compounds.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.
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The Senior Engineer Signal: The 2026 Risk Your Velocity Metrics HideJuniors 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.
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Agent Sprawl: The 2026 Engineering Risk Your Auditor Hasn't Named YetUnknown numbers of AI coding agents run in parallel — no audit trail, no isolation, no per-team measurement. By 2026 that's an audit finding.
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Docker supply chain hardening — from Scout D to OpenSSF 7.8 on a 730K-pull imageHow 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.
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Cloudflare Web Analytics on Astro — Why Removing GA4 Unlocked Lighthouse 100How removing Google Analytics 4 from an Astro site unlocked Lighthouse 100, why Cloudflare Web Analytics replaced it, and what the tradeoffs actually cost.
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The Intake Gate Your CISO Is Missing — 300 Million AI Chat Messages Were Public by DefaultHalf of AI-enabled apps on major backends carry severe misconfigurations. Inside the 300M-message Firebase breach and a 3-layer protocol to stop Agent Sprawl.
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I Tested an AI Agent on My Live Systems. Here Is the Blast Radius Assessment Every Engineer Is Skipping.Everyone's installing AI agents on Mac Minis. I tested one in isolation — the architectural framework for deployment the hype leaves out.
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Amazon Project Dawn Cut 30,000 Jobs — Including the Head of AWS Community Builders. Here's What It Means.Amazon laid off Jason Dunn, architect of the AWS Community Builders program. The signal: community must prove production value, not engagement metrics.
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Infosys Deploys Devin AI Globally — And Your DevOps Career Just Became Legacy LaborInfosys deployed Devin AI globally. If you compete on technical execution as a DevOps engineer, you're now Legacy Labor — the blueprint to survive.
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The End of the Executor — Why Computer Vision Engineers Are Becoming OptionalAnisoptera's Dragonfly platform proved specialized CV engineers are replaceable. The math ($150k vs $5k) and the blueprint to survive the shift.
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AI Didn't Fix Productivity. Measurement Did.AI adoption is easy. Proving productivity isn't. A Docker Captain's view on why AI impact is hard to measure—and how teams can finally prove real value.
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Platform Engineering — The Complete, Practical Guide to Building Internal Developer Platforms That ScaleA practical guide to Platform Engineering — build internal developer platforms, golden paths, GitOps workflows, and scalable cloud foundations.
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Docker MCP — Turn GPT into a Real DevOps Assistant (Slack, GitHub, Stripe)Turn GPT into a real DevOps assistant with Docker MCP. How AI agents automate Slack, GitHub, Stripe, and more — securely and at scale.
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GitOps on AWS — Real-World DevOps Pipeline with Argo CD, Terraform & EKSBuild a production-grade GitOps pipeline on AWS with EKS, Argo CD, Terraform, Vault, and GitHub Actions. Real architecture — systems that scale.
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Why AI Fails Without DevOps — What No One Tells YouWithout DevOps, AI fails fast. Learn how containers, CI/CD, and GitOps keep LLMs and ML systems like OpenAI and Hugging Face running at scale.
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The AI Era — From Technology to Global DominationExploring a future where AI controls all aspects of life, redefining global governance and social interactions.