How I Actually Make Trade-off Calls — Not Just What I Build

cw@wagner.org.za (Chrisando Wagner) — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

If you’ve already read the build logs — the k3s cluster, the storage classes, the failover drill — you know what I build. This post is about the part that doesn’t show up in a terraform apply output: how I actually decide something, in the moment a plan stops matching reality, and what I do about it afterward.

That’s a different question than “what technology did you pick,” and it’s the one I think actually separates senior from principal-level work. Anyone competent can execute a plan that goes to schedule. What I’m going to walk through is a plan that didn’t, twenty minutes into a homelab rebuild, and the small, unglamorous decision that followed it — because that decision is a better sample of how I’ll behave on your platform than any tool list is.

Decision-Making on Chris Wagner

How I Actually Make Trade-off Calls — Not Just What I Build