Hi — I'm Mike Preston.
wwff.tech is my independent practice. I'm a site reliability engineer: I keep production systems up, make on-call bearable, and build the tooling that catches problems before customers do. The AI-built app reviews come from the same place — I spend my days finding the failure modes that ship by default.
What I actually do
Most of my work is unglamorous and important: turning noisy, fragile systems into ones a team can run without dreading the pager. That means SLOs that mean something, alerts worth waking up for, incident practices that stick, and cloud and Kubernetes foundations the team can own rather than fear. When the fix is a tool, I build the tool.
I work across AWS, GCP and Azure, on Kubernetes and plain Linux, mostly in Python. I care more about failure semantics, billing correctness and a clean audit trail than about whichever framework is fashionable this quarter — because those are the things that hurt when they're wrong, usually at the worst possible time.
Why I review AI-built apps
Because I build the kind of systems these apps are quietly trying to be, and I build the tooling that audits them. Some recent work, to show the shape of it:
- A multi-tenant LLM gateway for enterprise — effectively a financial control system with an AI-shaped interface, where metered billing, a tamper-evident audit log, and sane behaviour under failure are the product, not an afterthought.
- A set of security and supply-chain auditors whose whole job is to catch the mistakes that ship by default: leaked credentials in CI, over-privileged containers, unsigned images, dependency drift.
- An event-routing framework built on CloudEvents, for moving work between services without losing track of it.
The same instincts apply to an app built in a weekend with Lovable, Bolt, Replit or Cursor. The product idea is usually sound — real users have proved it. What's missing is the engineering underneath: who can read the database, where the keys live, what happens at fifty users instead of five. That's the gap a Defuse review closes.
Elsewhere
I write about the craft — runbooks, SLOs, on-call, and the small tools that make 3 a.m. less awful — at mikepreston.org. Rougher experiments and side projects live at darkflib.com. I'm based in Kegworth, in the UK, and work remotely.