Engineering approach

How decisions
get made.

Four rules that came out of costs already paid in the field. They are working constraints, not statements of intent.

Commissioning is where responsibility starts

Drawings, proposals and reports are intermediate products. The work is finished when the system runs in place — and stays finished only as long as it keeps running.

No complexity without a reason

Every additional component is maintenance debt someone pays later. If the simple option covers the requirement, the impressive one is not chosen.

No change without a way back

Anything that touches a live system has a backup and a single-command return path before it is applied. Preparation, not courage.

Measured before it is claimed

Performance, capacity and recovery times are stated only where they have been observed. An untested assumption is documented as an assumption.

Problem types

Where the rules came from

Each rule exists because one of these situations was handled badly at least once.

A production line that has to keep running while its network is rebuilt underneath it.

A facility reachable only through carrier NAT that still needs maintenance access without a truck roll.

Operational data that never leaves the machine it was measured on, because nothing was built to carry it out.

A service with a nightly backup that has never once been restored, so nobody knows whether it works.