Engineering leader focused on reliability and high-scale backend systems — plus weekend side projects. Previously Fortnite, Epic Games, HashiCorp, AWS, and Rockstar.https://peteshima.com/https://peteshima.com/2026/04/01/on-software-quality/https://peteshima.com/2026/04/01/on-software-quality/Everyone’s busy, tl;dr Trust is a tricky thing “Trust comes on foot but leaves on horseback” is a Dutch proverb often attributed to the 19th-century Dutch statesman Johan Rudolph Thorbecke. It means tWed, 01 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMTEssayhttps://peteshima.com/2026/01/27/embark-matchmaking-backend-engineer-job/https://peteshima.com/2026/01/27/embark-matchmaking-backend-engineer-job/In Job Posting Review we take a quick, or sometimes detailed, look at a public job posting and comment on it. Since job postings come and go, a copy is listed here where we break it down. If you are tTue, 27 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMTJob Reviewhttps://peteshima.com/2025/11/21/the-most-interesting-thing-about-the-cloudflare-incident-report-isnt-in-the-report/https://peteshima.com/2025/11/21/the-most-interesting-thing-about-the-cloudflare-incident-report-isnt-in-the-report/The most recent Cloudflare outage was a pretty big one. They followed up with an incident report really quickly, same day is impressive. At other places I have worked that operated quickly, even 24 hoFri, 21 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMTIncidentshttps://peteshima.com/2025/08/18/getting-cooked-by-ai-a-gamejam-story/https://peteshima.com/2025/08/18/getting-cooked-by-ai-a-gamejam-story/I have never participated in a Game Jam before so I thought I would give this one a try. I am not expecting to win a game jam, more to learn and have fun building some games. What is a game jam? From Mon, 18 Aug 2025 00:00:00 GMTBuildinghttps://peteshima.com/2025/08/07/job-posting-review-grinding-gear-games-web-programmer/https://peteshima.com/2025/08/07/job-posting-review-grinding-gear-games-web-programmer/In Job Posting Review we take a quick, or sometimes detailed, look at a public job posting and comment on it. Since job postings come and go, a copy is listed here where we break it down. If you are tThu, 07 Aug 2025 00:00:00 GMTJob Reviewhttps://peteshima.com/2025/08/04/ai-agents-transforming-senior-engineer-career-peaks/https://peteshima.com/2025/08/04/ai-agents-transforming-senior-engineer-career-peaks/There was a chart drawn for me that I’ve also drawn for many folks over the years. It looks something like this: Career Impact Over Time This is someone’s impact over time in their career working as aMon, 04 Aug 2025 00:00:00 GMTCareerhttps://peteshima.com/2025/07/31/exploring-vibe-coding-building-glitchjack/https://peteshima.com/2025/07/31/exploring-vibe-coding-building-glitchjack/Over the last few days I have been vibe coding the game Glitchjack, a black jack inspired game with all sorts of glitches. Right now it is pretty basic with only generating a random deck on each game Thu, 31 Jul 2025 00:00:00 GMTBuildinghttps://peteshima.com/2025/07/26/reliability-in-games-series/https://peteshima.com/2025/07/26/reliability-in-games-series/Game launches and reliability over the past decade have had a troubled past. If you look at most major games they have had an outage or degraded experience at launch. There is almost an expectation frSat, 26 Jul 2025 00:00:00 GMTReliabilityhttps://peteshima.com/2025/07/26/reliability-in-games-high-level-issues/https://peteshima.com/2025/07/26/reliability-in-games-high-level-issues/This is part 1 of a series on Reliability in Games(RIG). Where we explore why games have so many reliability problems. This focuses more on large online games rather than single player or board games.Sat, 26 Jul 2025 00:00:00 GMTReliabilityhttps://peteshima.com/2023/08/07/18/https://peteshima.com/2023/08/07/18/Over the past few months Bungie put out a few posts on Destiny that detailed what they were doing on the back end and I finally got a chance to read through these. THIS WEEK AT BUNGIE – 05/18/2023THISMon, 07 Aug 2023 00:00:00 GMTReliabilityhttps://peteshima.com/2022/07/27/monitoring-your-home-network-updated/https://peteshima.com/2022/07/27/monitoring-your-home-network-updated/A practical, low-cost way to monitor your whole home network with InfluxDB 2.0 and Telegraf — ISP, wifi, and device health across multiple sites, with automatic alerting.Wed, 27 Jul 2022 00:00:00 GMTBuildinghttps://peteshima.com/2020/03/16/on-incident-assumptions/https://peteshima.com/2020/03/16/on-incident-assumptions/The world is on fire If you have been through a large number of high severity events, you’ve probably found yourself working with a mental model based on graphs, logs, or other telemetry – except the Mon, 16 Mar 2020 00:00:00 GMTIncidentshttps://peteshima.com/2017/04/05/onboarding-on-call-and-learning/https://peteshima.com/2017/04/05/onboarding-on-call-and-learning/A while back in the hangops slack I offered to try and help anyone that I could in the #career_advice or #job_board channels. I am no expert on these topics but maybe I have some knowledge that will hWed, 05 Apr 2017 00:00:00 GMTCareerhttps://peteshima.com/2016/07/20/stack-exchange-outage-postmortem-review/https://peteshima.com/2016/07/20/stack-exchange-outage-postmortem-review/A review of Stack Exchange's July 20, 2016 outage postmortem — the regex that spiked CPU, the cascading load-balancer failure, and how they communicated it.Wed, 20 Jul 2016 00:00:00 GMTIncidentshttps://peteshima.com/2016/06/10/petes-terraform-tips/https://peteshima.com/2016/06/10/petes-terraform-tips/My Terraform experience started with a single Terraform environment which is over a year old in production with over 3000 Terraform applies and over 4500 versions of state. The single environment grewFri, 10 Jun 2016 00:00:00 GMTBuildinghttps://peteshima.com/2016/01/28/github-outage-postmortem-review/https://peteshima.com/2016/01/28/github-outage-postmortem-review/A review of GitHub's public postmortem for the January 28, 2016 outage — what they communicated, how, and what made their incident response build customer trust.Thu, 28 Jan 2016 00:00:00 GMTIncidentshttps://peteshima.com/2016/01/21/5-lessons-learned-in-ops/https://peteshima.com/2016/01/21/5-lessons-learned-in-ops/Five lessons from years on operations teams: ask why, kill invisible work, own the negative space, build safety through process instead of policing, and optimize for both safety and speed.Thu, 21 Jan 2016 00:00:00 GMTCareerhttps://peteshima.com/2012/01/07/response-to-chef-in-2012/https://peteshima.com/2012/01/07/response-to-chef-in-2012/A long response to 'Chef in 2012' — the sysadmin-to-DevOps transition, testing infrastructure, cookbooks, and config-management adoption. (From the 2012 archives.)Sat, 07 Jan 2012 00:00:00 GMTEssayhttps://peteshima.com/2012/01/01/happy-new-beards/https://peteshima.com/2012/01/01/happy-new-beards/A New Year's reflection from 2012 — moving back to Seattle, leaving Windows for Mac/Linux, and learning Ruby and Chef. (From the archives.)Sun, 01 Jan 2012 00:00:00 GMTCareerhttps://peteshima.com/2011/12/14/riding-the-unicorn/https://peteshima.com/2011/12/14/riding-the-unicorn/A field guide to running the Unicorn rack server in production — worker tuning, preloading, sockets and backlog, plus monitoring with Nagios and god. (From the 2011 archives.)Wed, 14 Dec 2011 00:00:00 GMTBuilding