System Failure: A Manifesto

The Standard "Hello World" is a Lie.

You know the type. A pristine Medium article titled "How I Built a Scalable Microservice Architecture in a Weekend." It features clean diagrams, code snippets that work on the first try, and a smiling author who definitely didn't spend four hours crying because of a missing indentation in a YAML file.

This is not that blog.

Ace Defective is a crime scene. It is a documentation of the wreckage.

The Mission

I am currently building a Stealth Project on the Azure stack. I cannot tell you what it does (yet), or who it is for (yet). But I can tell you how it is being built.

Or, more accurately, how it is refusing to be built.

Modern software engineering isn't about writing code anymore; it's about plumbing. It's about convincing a Docker container to talk to a Managed Identity, which talks to a Key Vault, which is blocked by a Firewall rule that you forgot existed. It is a constant, grinding war of attrition against The Machine.

The Platform (This Blog)

To document the work, I had to build a platform. Naturally, I over complicated it.

• The Host: Azure Static Web Apps (The battleground).
• The Engine: Pelican (Python-based static generation, because life is too short for Javascript frameworks).
• The Pipeline: Azure DevOps (The judge, jury, and executioner).
• The Code: GitHub (The system of record).

This blog itself is the first project. If you are reading this, the pipeline finally worked.

Why "Ace Defective"?

Because perfection is a marketing term. In the real world, things break. Deployments fail. Credentials expire. We are all just defective operators trying to trick silicon into doing math.

I will be posting here regularly. Not just the solutions, but the failures. The TF402455 errors. The 403 Forbidden responses. The stupidity of trying to run a mail server in 2025.

If you are looking for polish, go to LinkedIn.

If you are looking for the logs, stay here.

End of line.