About LockerGnome
LockerGnome is daily tech news for the people who run the systems: sysadmins, SREs, platform and GitOps engineers, security folks, architects, and the CTO who still has root on something. Think TMZ meets Slashdot meets Hacker News. We cover technology through the drama and the hackery nobody else is writing about.
What we believe
You already run the systems. No explainers for tourists. You know what a load balancer is, and you’ve been the person paged at 3 a.m. because of one.
The mechanism is the story. “Power event takes down cloud region” isn’t news; outages happen every day. “A winter-mode switch turned a trading data center into a very expensive space heater” is. If we can’t put the specific thing that went sideways in the headline, we don’t run it.
Drama comes from people. A decision going wrong in real time, in a real room, with consequences somebody felt. A status page timeline isn’t drama.
Shipped beats demoed. A launch thread is marketing. A thing strangers installed this weekend is a story.
Fun counts. The person who signs the observability contract on Tuesday stuffed a homelab into a stack of dead routers on Saturday. We write for both of them, because they’re the same person.
Every visit should pay off. Something fun, something useful, something weird, something that makes you a little mad. If you leave with nothing, we blew it.
What we cover
- Hacks & Builds: the thing someone made because they could, done with total commitment.
- Security: exploits, breaches and the people behind them, when there’s a scene you can retell in one sentence.
- Infrastructure: outages, migrations and postmortems, once the specific human mistake crawls out.
- Tools & Gear: something you can actually use this week, from a CLI trick to a $3 chip.
- Retro: old machines doing new tricks, and new machines pretending to be old ones.
- Weird Tech: absurd constraints, lovingly honored.
- Drama & Failures: forks, lawsuits, flame wars, takedowns and launches that went sideways.
AI shows up in plenty of these, and it gets a tag, not a section. It’s seasoning, not the menu.
Every story opens with a TL;DR, says why it matters for your own stack, money or job, and ends with Steal this: a few things you can do about it.
What we skip
- Product announcements and model releases.
- Press releases rewritten as news.
- Outages with no cause and breaches with no scene.
- Trend pieces with no person in them.
- Policy stories until an actual admin is holding the install media.
How stories get made
Stories start with sources. Every story begins with something someone published: a first-person write-up, a project page, a filing, a report. Those sources are listed at the bottom of every story, linked, so you can read them yourself.
Drafts are machine-assisted. A language model drafts each story from its sources. Each claim in the draft is checked against the sources listed with it, and anything that can’t be traced to one is cut.
A person decides what runs. Chris Pirillo picks every story that publishes, edits it, and puts his name on it. Nothing goes live without him.
Quotes are exact. A quote appears word for word as its source published it, credited to the person who said it and the outlet that reported it.
Mistakes get fixed in the open. A corrected story says so under its headline. See the corrections policy.
Where it came from
LockerGnome started in 1996 as Chris Pirillo’s tech newsletter, then grew into a site and a community. It went quiet in 2014. This is the new one: same spirit, sharper bar.
Get in touch
Send tips, fixes and arguments to @lockergnome on X.