I recently found a very cool site to practice linux sysadmin type tasks, https://sadservers.com. The idea behind it is to allow learners to try solving realistic challenges that they might face in an actual system administration setting. The architecture basically involves giving each user their own virtual machine to run commands in, and in that […]

When trying out new things, especially things that you usually need to do in a live production system, it can be helpful to first have a low-stakes disposable environment to practice in. It’s also helpful to be able to practice at a much slower pace, and with time to think and digest, at your own […]

Inspired by the fantastic networking zine that Julia Evans made, I decided to try and create a micromaterial to practice using tcpdump to actually do something. While full of interesting ways to combine command line syntax for this tool, the zine deserved to be expanded on. I’ve seen this a lot of times, where tools […]

Finished this a while ago, but just getting around to writing a post about it now. A great mentor of mine once said, “To know what the code does, start by reading the tests”, which is excellent advice. So this micromaterial follows that process to practice completing some higher-order functions (functions that take functions as […]

I’m very happy to announce completed work on an MVP for a single user stringing together a number of micromaterials into a cohesive learning space (I totally made up this term, but will explain it a bit more below). https://github.com/learning-as-code/learning-space-template is a template repository on GitHub that you can use as an example to generate […]

It’s been a while since the last entry, which is mostly down to the fact that I have approx. 5 other projects going on concurrently, and also did some work on side-projects that aren’t really noteworthy (except that one of them made me the author of 57% of all cloud-based kubernetes-the-hard-way walkthroughs, nbd)… But now […]

Semantic versioning (or semver) is a very basic concept that stirs a bit of controversy on the internet. A quick google for “semantic versioning problems” brings back a number of essays about all the shortcomings. They do make fair points, though to be able to appreciate the deficiencies, it’s good to just understand the thing […]

https://cron-trigger.netlify.app/ https://github.com/lpmi-13/cron-trigger So cron expressions are a basic aspect of linux computing, and you’ll see them in all the major public cloud providers (AWS/Azure/GCP) for running things on a schedule. They’re useful to know, and once you’ve actually used them, they’re fairly straightforward. Well…AWS and Azure both use special syntaxes that are non-standard, but I […]

Asking learners to organize code blocks that have been shuffled around is an approach often referred to as Parsons Problems. There is an excellent short rationale for them, and also a more in-depth research study (along with various other online sources) if you’re interested in reading more. The general idea is that there is a […]

All credit for the amazing title “Snub Modules” goes to Peter West. https://github.com/lpmi-13/snubmodule Having created (and learned quite a bit from) the how to update a submodule micromaterial, I figured I’d go ahead and also learn how to “un-submodule” a submodule. Essentially, if you ever want to stop tracking a submodule and just have it […]