About

I’m Jeff Bailey, a principal software engineer. I’ve worked at Nike since 2019, first on the product customization platform and now on tech modernization and platform work: enterprise architecture, cloud cost optimization, and the InnerSource and open source practices that let teams share code instead of rebuilding it.

I’m a FinOps Certified Practitioner and a board member at InnerSource Commons. Before Nike I consulted for clients across retail, healthcare, and construction software. I’ve been writing code since the start of my career in the 90s, back through Earthlink and the early web. The full history is on my resume.

What’s on This Site

Notes from that work: what a tool does, how to get out of a bind, and why systems fail the way they do.

Fix something. The guides people land on most: the jq cookbook, permission denied (publickey), and sending system email to Gmail.
Learn something. The Learn X series covers the 20% of a tool that does 80% of the work, then points at the best resources for the rest.
Understand something. The Fundamentals series works through the concepts underneath the tools.
Commiserate. Death by 1000 Cuts is where software quality concerns arrive in the form of a rant.