Mentorship / Field notes
Feedback from engineers I've taught and mentored across the 2025 and 2026 cohorts. Kept close to the original words so you can judge the work for yourself.
DevOps · Systems Design · Platform Engineering · Reliability Engineering
2025 — 2026 · Multiple cohorts · Practical engineering training
See how I teach ↓The programs are designed around practical engineering rather than passive lectures. Engineers work through real infrastructure and systems problems, make architectural decisions, deploy services, diagnose failures, defend designs, and document the scars they acquire along the way.
The curriculum evolves between cohorts, so experiences may differ.
[Role] · 2026 Engineering Cohort
[Feedback entry goes here — this is a development placeholder, not a real quote. Real feedback will be published here once the engineer has reviewed and approved it.]
[Role] · 2026 Engineering Cohort
[Feedback entry goes here — placeholder.]
2025 Engineering Cohort
[Feedback entry goes here — placeholder, published anonymously.]
[Role] · 2025 Engineering Cohort
[Feedback entry goes here — placeholder.]
Entries marked PLACEHOLDER are development stand-ins. No feedback on this page is invented or attributed to a real person without permission.
Much of the learning happens when something breaks, an assumption turns out to be wrong, or an engineer has to explain why a design failed. I encourage engineers to record those moments rather than hide them.
The deployment worked locally and failed in AWS.
What changed: Understanding environment assumptions and runtime dependencies.
A security group looked correct until one service could reach something it shouldn't.
What changed: Thinking about network boundaries through negative tests.
The database index didn't fix the latency problem.
What changed: Learning to investigate workload shape rather than reaching for familiar fixes.
Where permission exists, the original submission can be inspected — written feedback, cohort reviews, articles, LinkedIn recommendations, or submitted forms. Any edit is limited to spelling, formatting, or privacy, and is labelled.
I'm less interested in teaching engineers to reproduce commands than helping them develop judgment. The work is structured around real constraints, difficult questions, ownership, operating failures, and explaining why a system should be trusted in production.
These cohorts are part of an ongoing body of work around developing engineers who can reason about real systems, not just use tools.
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