I’m not going to lie. Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) is a helpful technology. It’s supposed to have made getting a Linux environment on Windows easier. However, having just tried getting it up and running on the lone Windows box I own, I can confirm it’s a pain to install unless you’re a Windows system administrator or know what you’re doing. The hype for WSL2 appears to have overlooked the user experience. ...
This introduction to eBPF is adapted from the beginning of DevOps’ish 278 I occasionally ask for writing prompts from folks on Twitter for DevOps’ish. Sometimes asking on social media works well. Other times it’s giving someone a good URL and still scratching my head about what to write. But for DevOps’ish 278, the people have spoken. They want to learn more about eBPF. What is eBPF? eBPF (which is no longer an acronym for anything) is a revolutionary technology with origins in the Linux kernel that can run sandboxed programs in a privileged context such as the operating system kernel. It is used to safely and efficiently extend the capabilities of the kernel without requiring to change kernel source code or load kernel modules. ...
I opened someone’s Twitter profile in April and saw a Linktree URL. I click it and start to poke around after signing up for an account. The changing gradient backgrounds amuse me. I appreciate the mobile-friendliness and the built-in analytics. I needed something like this to help me add newsletter subscribers, guide folks to my various projects, and all the other things Linktree does. I have a lot of sites and social profiles. Plus, Linktree is better than throwing my entire website at someone and saying, “You figure me out.” With a Zapier integration, this can lead to newsletter signups too?!?! “I kinda need this,” I think to myself. I plop down my $60 for a year of service and spend the next few weeks adding, tweaking, and tinkering. Then let it sit. ...
I think I’ve discovered my development environment equivalent to nirvana. code-server fronted by Caddy on a box with Tailscale installed. I maintain a lot of Hugo websites. Hugo has been my go-to content management system (CMS) since discovering it in 2017 (I got my first Hugo site at GopherCon 2017). I’ve lost count of the number of domains I own (a common nerd problem). But, I know I have a handful of websites I update regularly. For years I’ve used the Settings Sync extension in VScode to make things consistent across machines. But something was always missing (for example, shell integration, fonts, etc.). ...
Pulled directly from the introduction of DevOps’ish 272 Conway’s Law and GitOps are two things that go hand in hand. I’d like that not to be the case, but in building and working with an upcoming demo of multi-cluster GitOps, I’m worried GitOps might not reach an escape velocity over Conway’s Law. Conway’s Law states, “Any organization that designs a system (defined broadly) will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization’s communication structure.” This might seem natural but think about the different ways we communicate now. E-mail, text messages, phone calls, Slack, Discord, Twitter, etc. are all communication tools that serve various purposes. But, in GitOps, whether you design around a good developer experience (using git as the only interface) or design around a minimalistic amount of tooling (one secret management solution), that tooling has to fit within Conway’s Law usually. ...