Infrastructure

What this series is about ​

This series is short and stays that way. Five posts circling the same question: where does your stack actually live, and how much of it do you control when the vendor stops being friendly?

It starts at the machine, in the boring and concrete sense: being able to reach the hardware that runs your software, change what is on it, and not be one billing dispute away from losing access. Then the same question moves a layer up, to your data. Where does it sit, whose law covers it, and who else can reach it?

The three newer posts show how that question has behaved since 2026. The third is about the price of tooling that felt subsidised for years. The fourth is about what leaves your machine the moment an agent signs in on your behalf, and how to keep that quiet. The fifth follows the same question into CI, where the runner an agent writes a workflow for is a machine you own and almost never look at.

I self-host nowhere near everything, and most of the time the trade-off goes the other way. It only holds up if you know what you are giving up, and that is what these posts are for. Where the line sits between convenience and dependence stays yours to draw. The series exists so you draw it deliberately.