System Design on Brent Hollers

A Real Take on the Practical Implications of AI in Tech

Fri, 20 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

AI Is a Powerful Tool. It’s Not a Replacement for Knowing What You’re Doing.

By Dr. Brent Hollers

There’s a conversation happening in nearly every tech team, IT department, and engineering org right now. It usually goes one of two ways: either AI is going to replace us all, or AI is completely overhyped and we should stop worrying about it. The truth, as usual, lives somewhere in the middle — and it’s a lot more interesting than either extreme.

How I Built a $7/Month DNS Caching Resolver for a K-12 School Using AWS and Terraform

Fri, 20 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

By Dr. Brent Hollers | Director of Information Technology, St. Mary’s Academy

Every year, PSAT morning arrives like a controlled fire drill. Hundreds of Chromebooks come online simultaneously, every student navigating to the same handful of testing URLs. The network holds. The internet connection holds. But something subtle bogs down the experience in those first critical minutes: DNS.

Most IT professionals don’t think about DNS until something breaks. I didn’t either — until I started looking at where time was actually being lost during high-concurrency events at our school. Every single device was firing DNS queries at external resolvers (Cloudflare, Google) independently, with no local caching. The same hostname, resolved a thousand times, with zero shared benefit. It was like every student in the building individually calling 411 to ask for the same phone number.

IaC Part 1: From Manual Chaos to Infrastructure as Code: Designing a School Absence System

Sun, 15 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

From Manual Chaos to Infrastructure as Code: Designing a School Absence System

Part 1 of 4: Building Production-Grade Infrastructure

The 7:45 AM Problem

It’s 7:45 AM on a Tuesday morning. The school secretary’s phone rings. It’s Mrs. Johnson calling in sick—again. The secretary scribbles a note on a sticky pad, crosses off Mrs. Johnson’s name on the coverage spreadsheet, and starts making calls to find a substitute for periods 3, 5, and 7.