February 22, 2026Database tests are the tests most teams get wrong. They either skip them entirely (testing with mocks, then discovering schema mismatches in production), or they build a fragile suite sharing a single database where tests interfere with each other. The right approach depends on what you are testing and what tradeoffs you can accept.
Fixtures are static SQL files loaded before a test suite runs:
February 22, 2026Silent alerts are the most dangerous failure mode in monitoring. The system appears healthy because no one is being paged, but the condition you intended to catch is actively occurring. Work through this checklist in order.
Open the Prometheus UI at /graph and run the alert expression directly. If the expression returns empty, the alert cannot fire regardless of anything else.
February 22, 2026Most ArgoCD problems fall into predictable categories: sync stuck in a bad state, resources showing OutOfSync when they should not be, health checks reporting wrong status, RBAC blocking operations, or repository connections failing. Here is how to diagnose and fix each one.
An application stuck in Progressing means ArgoCD is waiting for a resource to become healthy and it never does. The most common causes:
February 22, 2026When a GitHub Actions workflow fails or does not behave as expected, the problem falls into a few predictable categories. This guide covers each one with the diagnostic steps and fixes.
The most common GitHub Actions “bug” is a workflow that never runs.
Check the event and branch filter. A push trigger with branches: [main] will not fire for pushes to feature/xyz. A pull_request trigger fires for the PR’s head branch, not the base branch:
February 22, 2026Nginx shows up in Kubernetes in two completely different roles. First, as a regular Deployment serving static content or acting as a reverse proxy for your application. Second, as an Ingress controller that watches Ingress resources and dynamically reconfigures itself. These are different deployments with different images and different configuration models. Knowing when to use which saves you from over-engineering or under-engineering your setup.
For serving static files or acting as a reverse proxy in front of your application pods, deploy nginx as a standard Deployment.
February 22, 2026An “agent-ready” project is just a well-documented project. Every practice that helps an agent — clear conventions, explicit commands, tracked progress, documented decisions — also helps a new team member, a future-you who forgot the details, or a contractor picking up the project for the first time.
The difference is that humans can ask follow-up questions and gradually build context through conversation. Agents cannot. They need it written down, in the right place, at the right level of detail. Projects that meet this bar are better for everyone.
February 22, 2026An Internal Developer Platform (IDP) is the set of tools, workflows, and self-service capabilities that a platform team builds and maintains so application developers can ship code without filing tickets or waiting on other teams. It is not a single product. It is a curated layer on top of your existing infrastructure that abstracts complexity while preserving the ability to go deeper when needed.
February 22, 2026The most dangerous thing an agent can do is confidently produce a deliverable based on wrong assumptions. An agent that assumes x86_64 when the target is ARM64, that assumes PostgreSQL 14 behavior when the target runs 15, or that assumes AWS IAM patterns when the target is Azure – that agent produces a runbook that will fail in ways the human did not expect and may not understand.
February 22, 2026Devcontainers provide disposable, reproducible development environments that run in a container. You define the tools, extensions, and configuration in a .devcontainer/ directory, and any compatible host – GitHub Codespaces, Gitpod, VS Code with Docker, or the devcontainer CLI – builds and launches the environment from that definition.
For infrastructure validation, devcontainers solve a specific problem: giving every developer and every CI run the exact same set of tools at the exact same versions, without requiring them to install anything on their local machine. A Kubernetes devcontainer includes kind, kubectl, helm, and kustomize at pinned versions. A Terraform devcontainer includes terraform, tflint, checkov, and cloud CLIs. The environment is ready to use the moment it starts.
February 22, 2026A CI job was cancelled, a laptop lost network, or a process crashed mid-apply. Terraform refuses to run:
Error acquiring the state lock
Lock Info:
ID: f8e7d6c5-b4a3-2109-8765-43210fedcba9
Operation: OperationTypeApply
Who: deploy@ci-runner
Created: 2026-02-20 09:15:22 +0000 UTCVerify the lock holder is truly dead. Check CI job status, then:
terraform force-unlock f8e7d6c5-b4a3-2109-8765-43210fedcba9If the lock was from a crashed apply, the state may be partially updated. Run terraform plan immediately after unlocking to see the current situation.