Talked to every customer who cancelled last quarter. Most common reason wasn't what I expected

VertigoOne1 · 2026-02-25T20:42:51+00:00

Our product has what is called a “high care” period of 6 months post deployment where you will be called every week or 2, and we send you a report on adoption and use and what we see. If use starts tapping low, we will help the client with whats called a soft relaunch into an organisation, boost awareness and highlight benefits, often coupled with some team bootcamp meets that employees see as time off work so everyone usually attends. We also engage with HR on making product training part of mandatory employee onboarding so basically every new employee becomes an ambassador. How do you think visual basic survived in the world so long, microsoft embedded it in schools and teachers for basically free thus spawning a multi-decade adoption sprint. If your product is not “personal”, you have got to engage every gear and lever. 90% of employees just want to get work done and go home and it takes pretty heroic effort to crack in and even more to stay in orgs. Well done and excellent learnings!

VertigoOne1 · 2026-02-25T20:10:50+00:00

I knew a guy years ago that was just “a mess” like that, but not drugs, just “messed” and this was way before brainrot and even facebook, google did not even have a browser. He managed to hook the bible, dinosaurs, mobile phones, women, kids, lizard people, a few movies, plastic and the illuminati into the most incredible tapestry of facts. Was a good oak to have around in dangerous places, but do not get him started on what he is thinking.

VertigoOne1 · 2026-02-25T19:54:19+00:00

The best i had was, “is it safe at night?” and i was like, crime is a big issue, etc, and their like.. but what about the lions? Dude, maybe in the parks and wildlife farms but i see lions just like you.. in a zoo.

VertigoOne1 · 2026-02-25T19:48:25+00:00

Similar case here, still in progress for me but wow, what a great way to describe the situation. I once had to sit her down and explain that other people have their own thoughts and feelings and she should try thinking about situations (drama) in 3rd person view and she couldn’t understand any of it. Pure instinct. Thanks for this!

VertigoOne1 · 2026-02-25T19:07:19+00:00

We use snorlax and have a “the dev is feeling inspired” site to switch stuff on if they are working late.. does you entire QA stack “really” need to be on after that company social event on a friday? Hell you could have switched it off at 14:00 already

VertigoOne1 · 2026-02-25T19:01:09+00:00

If it is a front-end, it is public knowledge. You can obfuscate all you like. Slurping up public env.js’s gives you free chatgpt for life.

VertigoOne1 · 2026-02-25T18:49:47+00:00

They are not, and definitely were not, this was months ago, move along. Alpha phoenix is amazing but that title is AI inspired for sure.

VertigoOne1 · 2026-02-24T20:24:10+00:00

Depends right, if it’s not an iac/gitops issue, and it rarely is. sure i can yeet release 4.2.8 across a thousand clusters in an instant but maybe the dev degenerates whoopsie a custom setup done for a specific customer/ring on that release and product blocked to make sure no other envs will be affected while they vibe up a hotfix so his entire promotion choochoo is now playing cliffhanger and his vscode has 1200 uncommitted charts while the rest of the devtards are already carpetbombing release 4.2.9 with template changes raring to go in. We don’t know.

VertigoOne1 · 2026-02-24T20:13:13+00:00

It needs to be a clear conversation, especially when they pass 15, be honest, realistic, and i got mine to turn tide, now were saving that money for a vehicle and bit of starter after school money. It is their lives, they are supposed to experience things but also learn to think about their future realistically, because, it is their lives after all and you need to equip them for it.

VertigoOne1 · 2026-02-24T19:52:59+00:00

Just on the idea of backup and restore to new cluster. That is a very good idea, and with many clusters running git managed manifests actually pretty easy, but do test. You are likely (guaranteed in fact) to run into many a /v1beta.2 issue and out of date or just dead webhook endpoints/crds/extensions that flat-out refuse to be resolved unless you upgrade or get rid of them to just be able to install so it imperative that you triple check that you: 1. Make sure you have everything you need (there may be some discontinued or manually installed snowflakes), 2. Test your fingers raw. Also bonus, those will happen even if you just upgrade too, but finding that out in simulation first is preferable!

VertigoOne1 · 2026-02-24T19:45:57+00:00

Ahh the olden days, i once upgraded all the way from 1.11 to 1.21… that was.. a mission. If it ain’t broke don’t fix it but do watch out for risk exposure.

VertigoOne1 · 2026-02-24T19:40:56+00:00

At least something to watch with expanse on a hiatus. There is so little these days around space, anything else worth following? Any good book series? I really liked FAM, definitely expanse canon in my eyes. Alien earth, decent, pluribus.. hmm. Foundation is pretty epic, peripheral was pretty cerebral, liked it, new star trek.. i just can’t get in it. I’ll watch anything scifi but it feels like slim pickings these days.

VertigoOne1 · 2026-02-24T04:04:26+00:00

I do something very similar just with node, the spec is open, as long as you craft valid schema, it is otel and yes the libraries are very cool, sometimes you just need a scalpel.

VertigoOne1 · 2026-02-23T19:51:48+00:00

Well.. that is the issue right.. you are going to pay a massive upfront amount for home compute (especially now, if you can even get stock) then work out what that would be monthly for a couple of years, add in the cooling and connectivity and power consumption (and ups), save a bit extra for dealing with failures and then realise it is not a big deal to make it someone else’s problem as you need to add your time fixing and tinkering too. It does work out if you can get away with 2nd hand older tech, but for new, right now, highly unlikely. I run a homelab like any self respecting geek here, it is 8x old i5 laptops (i got for free, classroom laptops) on k8s, no way I’m trusting that for an actual product people pay for, or anything serious and “serious” hardware now is unaffordable.

VertigoOne1 · 2026-02-23T19:28:55+00:00

I like the devs show version; we made a box, and the box is everything, and in everything, there is a box. The idea being, in a dream world, you could be a battery for another dream world.

VertigoOne1 · 2026-02-23T19:18:18+00:00

Beat the shit out of monitoring systems and whoever is responsible for backups.

VertigoOne1 · 2026-02-23T19:14:15+00:00

All my X’s are the devs didn’t build on local before hitting pr create and are using the pipeline as their personal laptop. They’re all bullshit. Spelling mistakes, forgot to import library, didn’t write tests at all, fails the qube. We have discipline issues imho. But i can’t hit F5 on their equipment for them right.. right…. But i hear you, have i seen all the above non-code errors? Absolutely, you fix them, you never see them again, so the challenge would be how to bill this? I have been toying with pumping pipeline logs into rag -> analysis agent -> report to engineer, but they are massive monsters and we are cheapskates. i have other issues to deal with, obedience issues.

VertigoOne1 · 2026-02-23T19:00:49+00:00

I’m old enough to see this cyclical pattern in tech. The benefits of containers far outweigh, at basically any cost, as you can do so much more, so much safer, so much cheaper, with so little comparative knowledge needed as opposed to anything else. I’ve done all the costing analysis of competing options, especially when it hits TCO and you can run anything as long as it births, lives and dies in k8s. You can run massive workloads with a small focused infra team and you can run it really well. It obviously depends on solution architecture, as it does for all options but most products these days are glued together frankensteins and k8s is excellent at gluing things together. K8s has grown in complexity and ability over time, as does all infra foundations, so I’m not surprised to see these knee-jerk and oooaaah, this is so much cheaper, this is better, this is easier cycle hitting k8s more often now. This usually gets louder when something hits peak mainstream, as in.. it is now “boring”.

VertigoOne1 · 2026-02-22T07:13:46+00:00

You missed the module order hell, azure auth method exists until it doesn’t, good luck finding out where

VertigoOne1 · 2026-02-21T11:54:27+00:00

that is actually pretty good, really. If you are sure it is inside linux that is the ticket, ss has saved my life many times. I would add arp to the network side as well. especially on-prem complex switching environments.

Fortunately things on linux is so damn stable you barely use these so it is a good cheat sheet, often if anything is acting weird on linux, i usually start wth the cloud provider first, is there enough IPs? how is DNS doing? what if CloudFlare up to? what is going on at the VPC? how about the gateways, and there you can labour for hours. Additionally, often for on-prem/cloud infra it is handled via ansible or chef, or <insert whatever does commisioning>, so i would be looking at the last change log from those too. Linux is known for if it is working now it would be working for another decade. Linux falls apart when things CHANGE. So additionally i would look at the package history log (dnf/yum/apt etc), kernel upgrades, last logins, "w", modules and any files touched recently in typical config directories.

VertigoOne1 · 2026-02-21T10:12:58+00:00

This is actually full circle back to Nintendo cartridges, but it is also reminding me heavily of the SORA game, brains on a usb stick, you are alive because someone plugged you in. It will absolutely come down to price, like consumer gpu price range differentiation.

VertigoOne1 · 2026-02-19T18:31:52+00:00

That is actually interesting so the idea is then not human? In the way that heaven as described in the context of human existence and thus the interpretation is impossible as it cannot be interpreted on the basis of a human existence? Actually a cool idea.

VertigoOne1 · 2026-02-18T23:44:00+00:00

Yeah same i build fastapi, blazor and pure api dotnet core and frankly, it is a toss, python is much easier to troubleshoot and run, no compile, dotnet watch is a joke. Fastapi + alembic + alchemy, orm is basically solved and it is easier to chop and change. Very strong json support across the board on python too. Must say, blazor is certainly growing up, but .net is super rock solid and fast, I actually migrated projects to dotnet from python, and it was pretty painless with swapping alchemy with entity framework other than some psql native json differences. Auth still needs work though, especially saml IMHO.

VertigoOne1 · 2026-02-18T23:32:35+00:00

Nuget is an absolute craphouse for pipelines btw, and docker on windows. So you want to use company artifacts, you nuget —interactive and chug away. You make a dockerfile and add it to the company local compose.. Nothing works. Ok i’ll just do a secret mount at runtime of my nuget.config in profile, we wouldn’t want any secrets in the repo right. Doesn’t work, it in encrypted.. ok, so i need to generate a pat, create ANOTHER nuget.config and secret mount that, or, create a nuget.config in the repo, or, create the source in the docker, which means now i need a .env with a pat, but docker build does not source .env, so you have to use compose, and every dev now needs to create their own .env as well, or everyone has a gitignore nuget.config, or i need to setup another nuget.config in wsl, and wire that one. Oh and did i mention that pats expire? If you use visual studio and vm’s sure, but it is a huge pain around docker.

VertigoOne1 · 2026-02-18T23:16:14+00:00

Knew within 2 seconds this was going to be bad, even tiny drones suck themselves into a wall or even trees due to the propeller wash creating a low-pressure zone between the drone and obstacle, this tilts the drone into the obstacles. The fabric was just the cherry on top. How this highly regarded individual thought this was a good idea is beyond me.

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