The first blog post since my very fun presentation for 90DaysOfDevops, and true to form, I built a thing to teach what I wanted to learn (debugging k8s resource manifests). While I think the actual coolest thing to come out of all of this was getting to experience Excalidraw (source of above graphic, and 11/10 […]

This is a video presentation I recorded for the 90DaysOfDevops virtual conference, and in it I described the Three Ways of DevEdOps: Admittedly, the term “DevEdOps” didn’t exist as term until I made it up for the purposes of this presentation, but I think that the DevOps culture has a lot of interesting implications for […]

I wanted to do a bit of practice with nmap and general networking stuff, and so I decided to create a very simple micromaterial for myself on lateral movement through a series of interconnected containers via SSH hopping. Really, the main issue (and the thing I ended up learning the most about) was getting the […]

Editor’s note: This doesn’t fit the strict definition of a micromaterial…but it’s my blog, so I can write about whatever I want! In discussions of SLOs (Service Level Objectives), one of the primary aims is to find a number that expresses something related to user happiness. For example, in the widely cited Amazon page load […]

Since the most important part of any side project is settling on a good domain name for it, I was absolutely crushed that https://jq.party was already taken. …but I digress. My latest contribution to the world of micromaterials is https://github.com/lpmi-13/jq-pilot. Much like the Mongo Dojo, the original idea of the Jq Pilot (named after my […]

I found that I continually overestimated the size of JSON payloads, so I figured I might as well do something about it! I created https://howbigisthisjson.netlify.app mostly to help myself, but following a familiar template of making a very simple micromaterial that can be shared publicly. In Easy Mode, you just see three options, all about […]

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 […]