Hello World — What This Blog Is About

Ten years. That's how long I've been working in DevOps. Watched the industry go from bare-metal deployments to containers to serverless to whatever we're calling it now. Worked at Octopus Deploy, CircleCI, and Vercel — all companies built around the idea that deploying software shouldn't be a nightmare.

And yet, here we are. Every week, someone on a Slack I'm in asks: "We're using [tool X], it's been a pain — what's a good alternative?"

I always answer. I've answered the same questions dozens of times. So I figured: why not write it all down somewhere public?

What this blog is

Looking For is a blog about finding better tools. Specifically — alternatives to the tools that DevOps teams, developers, and engineering leaders use every day. CI/CD pipelines, deployment platforms, monitoring stacks, secret managers, feature flags, IaC tools. The whole zoo.

Each post will focus on a real scenario: someone is unhappy with Tool A, here's what Tool B (and maybe C) actually looks like when you use it in production. Not just the marketing page — the real stuff. Migration pain, pricing surprises, things that break at 3am.

What this blog is not

Sponsored. I'm not here to sell you anything. No affiliate links. No "Top 10 tools you should try" listicles written by someone who's never deployed anything.

I have opinions. Some tools I like a lot. Some I think are genuinely bad choices for most teams. I'll say both.

Why the alias?

Because I still consult and I'd rather my opinions not be mistaken for my employer's. Whisky Bob is me. I drink Scotch, I debug YAML, and I've been in enough post-mortems to fill a book.

Stick around. First real post is coming soon — CI/CD alternatives to CircleCI for teams that outgrew it (or got priced out).

— Whisky Bob