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Distilling the Cloud: The Journey Continues
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
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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The Deceptive Promise of AI
The promise of AI automating mundane tasks seems appealing but is fundamentally flawed. It may eliminate boring jobs, but it doesn’t provide economic security. Displaced workers will be forced to seek new employment. This will turn creative passions into money-making endeavors, stripping them of their joy.
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Managing Multiple Identities with Git Configuration
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
The GitOps movement enhances infrastructure and application management through automation and transparency but implementation always presents challenges.
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Containerized RSS
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!
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?”
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
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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Simplify, simplify, simplify
Recently, I’ve been diving into Walter Isaacson’s biography of Elon Musk, which offers insights into his approach to business. Musk’s approach to process improvement isn’t dissimilar from my own. He suggests that if you’re not reintegrating at least 10% of what you cut, you’re not being aggressive enough in your simplification. In my experience managing IT operations, this is huge! I’ve managed to streamline tools saving my orgs millions. But I also learned that cutting costs can have unforeseen implications, necessitating a balance between simplification and operational continuity.