2025
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Distilling the Cloud: The Journey Continues
Jul 16
Discover how transitioning from cloud services to self-managed infrastructure can dramatically reduce costs while maintaining reliability and security for your applications.
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Finding Balance: Building Scalable Systems While Paying the Bills
Jun 30
Engineering leaders face a constant tension: building the perfect, scalable system versus shipping products that generate revenue. Learn how successful technical leaders navigate this balance, keeping engineering excellence in sight while delivering business value that keeps the lights on.
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Managing Multiple Identities with Git Configuration
May 28
Discover the power of Git’s conditional includes to automatically switch between different developer identities, email addresses, and signing keys based on your project directory structure.
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Overcoming GitOps Implementation Challenges
May 6
The GitOps movement enhances infrastructure and application management through automation and transparency but implementation always presents challenges.
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Containerized RSS
Apr 30
Join me on an exploration of FreshRSS as an alternative to the gone-but-not-forgotten Google Reader. We’ll even walk through setting it up locally with Docker and Tailscale for easy access.
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Blogs and NUCs and Caching, Oh My!
Apr 29
A year ago, I migrated my site to a self-hosted NUC cluster, defying industry skepticism about home hosting. Using a WordPress stack with Varnish and Cloudflare, I optimized performance and security, achieving over 30% traffic caching.
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When is a Deployment “Good Enough?”
Apr 23
Balancing speed and quality is crucial for software delivery. While rapid development can lead to fragile systems, overengineering may allow competitors to succeed. I’ve used containerization and Kubernetes for years, and I’m building a new tool to simplify both for all engineers.
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GitOps and DIY Infrastructure: A Match Made in DevOps Heaven
Apr 22
GitOps represents a transformative approach to managing and deploying applications by merging version control with DevOps. It automates changes, enhances security, and offers a single source of truth, especially beneficial for DIY infrastructure. GitOps practitioners can achieve self-healing infrastructure and improved management through infrastructure as code while overcoming learning curves.
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Consistent Infrastructure
Apr 9
I learned to code on Windows and deployed to Ubuntu, and the bugs that gap caused taught me the lesson: inconsistent environments kill velocity. From WAMP to Vagrant and beyond, why development should match production.
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A Foray into Private Hosting
Apr 2
I’m going to revolutionize the way you host software on the internet! Follow along as I build in the open – starting with a private git server run by Forgejo and networked with Tailscale. Follow and stay tuned for more!
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Job Search – Unreasonable Expectations
Mar 13
I found a great job listing with Canonical. Despite my love for their products and experience in the field, after just the first interview step I’m withdrawing.
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Technology has gotten dumber
Feb 14
I was searching Digital Ocean’s website for a specific product. I found it! Except, it doesn’t actually exist. It seems technology has just gotten dumber over time …