D.Challoner
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§ Chapter V

Articles

Writing about the
stubborn craft of engineering.

Essays on distributed systems, reliability, AI infrastructure, and the slower-moving ideas that I come back to again and again. A new piece every two or three weeks — occasionally faster, never on a schedule.
Books
2 · contributor
Essays
Ad hoc
Patents
1 disclosure
Feed
LinkedIn · Email

§ Featured

Essay · March 2026

Latest — On LinkedIn

Climbing the Agentic Coding Ladder.

A working field guide to the rungs of autonomous coding: what agents can do reliably today, what they can fake, and where the real boundary lives. Drawn from running the benchmarks on my own code — not a curated leaderboard.

Read on LinkedIn →MMXXVI

§ Selected writing, talks & publications

№ 06

Fwd:CloudSec

YouTube

Data access controls at Google.→

A Fwd:CloudSec presentation on how data access controls work inside Google, with a fairly unapologetic amount of systems-level nerding out.

AuthZ

№ 05

Mar 2026

LinkedIn

Climbing the Agentic Coding Ladder.→

A working field guide to autonomous coding: which rungs are reliable today, which are still theatre, and how to tell from your own codebase rather than a curated leaderboard.

AI Eng.

№ 04

Apr 2024

TDCommons

Access Control Based on Entire Request Path.→

Invention disclosure. Rather than authorizing only source and destination, validate every device a request traverses — so regulated data can’t drift outside permitted regions on the way.

AuthZ

№ 03

Aug 2022

Google Cloud

Securing apps for Googlers using Anthos Service Mesh.→

Co-authored with Anthony Bushong. How Access SRE and Corp Eng adopted Anthos Service Mesh to mediate Googler access across trust boundaries, across cloud and on-prem, with consistent policy and minimal ops overhead.

Service Mesh

№ 02

2020

Book — Google

Building Secure and Reliable Systems.→

Contributing author. Google’s companion volume to the SRE Book, bringing reliability and security into a single coherent discipline.

Security

№ 01

2018

Book — Ch. 6

The Site Reliability Workbook — Eliminating Toil.→

Primary author of Chapter 6. A practitioner’s guide to identifying, measuring, and reducing the repetitive operational work that erodes SRE team capacity — and what to do with the capacity you get back.

SRE

More writing lives on LinkedIn.

The dispatch

One careful letter,
every other Sunday.

New essays in your inbox, lightly annotated with whatever I happened to be reading that week. No tracking, no upsells, no drip sequences. Unsubscribe with a thought.

Occasional, careful, never algorithmic.