Twenty-Five Years of Checklists, Finally Written Down

Twenty-five years of infrastructure work leaves you with a strange inheritance: a head full of checklists nobody ever wrote down.

The twenty-four things I verify before a logging implementation ships to production. The questions an enterprise architecture charter has to answer before anyone draws a single diagram. The exact severity model that separates “block this release” from “fix it Tuesday.” The decision-rights model that keeps an architecture review board from becoming the place projects go to die.

For two decades that knowledge lived in my head, in scattered documents, in “give me a call and I'll walk you through it.” It worked, but it didn't scale, and it wasn't inspectable. When you hire a practitioner, you're partly paying for the checklists they carry around — and you usually can't see them until the work is done.

So I spent the last few months writing all of it down. Properly.

The result is ABME — Architectural Blueprints for Modern Enterprises — fifty enterprise engineering blueprints across architecture, security, cloud, PowerShell, and AI-assisted engineering. Ten per track. Each one is a phased playbook with the actual tools built in: the checklists, the decision matrices, the fill-in templates, the AI prompt packs. Not descriptions of tools. The working tools themselves — ready to copy, check off, or download.

What makes it different from the analyst firms is simple: this isn't research written by people who study the work. It's the operating model I've implemented in production, across dozens of client environments, written by the person who ran it. Built by a practitioner, for practitioners.

The reading layer is free — every blueprint's problem framing, phased approach, and insights, no account required. One tool per track is free every month, no card. Membership unlocks the full execution layer for twenty dollars a month.

If you want to see the shape of it, start with the one I'd reach for first: Add Enterprise Logging to a PowerShell Script — the workflow that turns “the script failed” into “here's what failed, where, and why,” with a twenty-four-point validation checklist you can use today.

Twenty-five years of checklists. Finally somewhere you can read them. That's ABME.