About this site

This is Signal from /dev/null — notes from someone whose job is to keep production honest.

It's written by Colin Wood (handle: 0xFatalNull), a Principal Systems Architect specialising in observability and security. The handle predates the personal brand. 0x for hex, FatalNull for null pointer dereference — it says "I was in the systems before this was a career path." The handle is the history. The name is the present. Both are true.

What you'll find here

• Observability — OpenTelemetry, instrumentation, tracing, and the gap between "we have dashboards" and "we know what's happening."
• Security and infrastructure — practical posture, supply chain, homelab teardowns, and the controls that don't slow developers down.
• Systems thinking — how the parts add up, where the leverage is, what survives contact with production.
• Occasional book reviews — the ones worth your time. Filed separately so the technical readers don't have to scroll past them.

The voice is declarative. Opinions are formed before the post is written. Analogies sometimes come from basketball, fitness, or Spanish — not as lifestyle content, but because the same systems thinking applies.

A few things I believe out loud

• Observability is governance. It's not about dashboards — it's about whether a system can tell the truth about itself.
• Security should be invisible to the developer experience. A gate that slows the team down is a gate that gets bypassed.
• Most of what ends up on HackerNews doesn't belong in your stack. Seniority is knowing which 10% does.

Cadence

Roughly weekly. No newsletter algorithm theatre — if you subscribe, the post lands in your inbox when it's published, and that is the entire contract.

Elsewhere

• GitHub — github.com/0xFatalNull
• Bluesky — @0xfatalnull.bsky.social
• Email — [email protected] for code things, [email protected] for everything else