Blog

The Slide on the 50-Yard Line

Jan 20, 2026 · marching band, leadership lessons, engineering leadership, infrastructure leadership, devops culture, site reliability engineering, SRE, systems thinking, team leadership, failure stories

A story about becoming a leader before I ever knew what infrastructure was — from a sun-baked Georgia parking lot, to a silver trombone slide skidding across the 50-yard line, to the quiet lessons that shaped …

The Unsung Horrors of Managing Data Centers

Jan 14, 2026 · datacenters, infrastructure, sre, war-stories, incident-response, hardware-failure, reliability-engineering, real-world-devops, on-call-life, physical-infrastructure

Behind every “five nines” uptime promise is a fragile web of cables, power feeds, human hands, and silent failure modes waiting to surface. This essay pulls back the curtain on the physical reality behind modern infrastructure—where …

Making a Fantasy Mother’s Day Card with AI

May 22, 2025 · Mother's Day,Creative Projects,AI Art

Mother’s Day snuck up on me this year, and I wanted to do something a little more magical than just a store-bought card. My wife is a rockstar mom — fierce, fun, and the glue that …

Welcome to the New NickTheGray.com

May 16, 2025 · welcome

I've been hard at work rewriting my website (again). Welcome to the next iteration of nickthegray.com!