Kevin Sookocheff

When working with LLMs I find myself needing to update or correct the model with information specific to my work environment.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. — Arthur C.

I work on Workiva’s cloud platform engineering team, where we design and operate Kubernetes and AWS infrastructure supporting more than 300 microservices across multiple AWS regions.

I, like many of you, am wrestling with how to best apply AI to my career as a software engineer.

This blog has been a part of my life for over fifteen years ago.

In an attempt to move more of my music workflow off of my Mac and onto real hardware, I recently bought a set of used Korg Volca synthesizers for experimenting with synthesis and drum programming.

This is an article in a series on Cryptography for the Everyday Developer.

This is an article in a series on Cryptography for the Everyday Developer.

When deploying microservices on Kubernetes, how many replicas should I run?

This is an article in a series on Cryptography for the Everyday Developer.

This is an article in a series on Cryptography for the Everyday Developer.

This is an article in a series on Cryptography for the Everyday Developer.

This is an article in a series on Cryptography for the Everyday Developer.

CloudFront supports two logging modes: v2 logging and legacy logging.

If you have a Dell monitor and an M-series chip from Apple, you may have encountered flickering issues with your monitor which — at times — can render it completely unusable.

This is the fifth article in a series on Cryptography for the Everyday Developer.

This is the fourth article in a series on Cryptography for the Everyday Developer.

This is the third article in a series on Cryptography for the Everyday Developer.

This is the second article in a series on Cryptography for the Everyday Developer.

This is the first article in a series on Cryptography for the Everyday Developer.

In this blog post, we will explore how to use simulated annealing to cluster a Design Structure Matrix (DSM).

At AWS re:Invent 2023, Amazon CTO Werner Vogels delivered a talk on the laws of frugal architecture.

If you work with US government entities or corporations in regulated markets the subject of FIPS compliance may come up, especially in the context of FedRAMP authorization.

Most new applications are built as a single codebase and deployed as a monolith until product-market fit or the need for additional scale is required.

eBPF is a technology allowing you to dynamically program the kernel using a virtual machine approach.

One of the larger hurdles to climb when becoming FedRamp moderate is encrypting all data in transit using FIPS validated encryption modules.

This article provides guide to the different developer tools available for writing eBPF programs, covering the core tools BCC, bpftrace, ebpf-go, and libbpf.

A common pattern when scaling a SaaS application is to deploy your stack to multiple regions across the globe.

A short tagline from the book Learning eBPF describes eBPF as a revolutionary kernel technology that allows developers to write custom code that can be loaded into the kernel dynamically, changing the way the kernel behaves.

DynamoDB provides built-in support for cross regional data replication using a solution AWS calls global tables.

Disaster events are one of the biggest challenges that a software organization can face.

Check out the project on Github.

AWS provides four different storage options for your Kubernetes cluster: EBS, EFS, FSx for Lustre, and Amazon File Cache.

Dealing with storage is a core challenge when running complex applications on Kubernetes.

eBPF is a relatively new extension of the Linux kernel that can run sandboxed programs in a privileged context.

I was recently introduced to a simple article on system design: Users are almost always right.

I was recently testing file upload performance, and needed several large files of different sizes to test with.

A JWT (JSON Web Token) is a type of security token that is used to securely transmit information between parties.

Application Portfolio Management (APM) draws inspiration from financial portfolio management, which has been around since at least the 1970s.

Shortly after deploying a new Kubernetes cluster, one of the first things you will likely want to do is collect some metrics and data about how it operates.

At some point in your career you will be asked to manage a project.

Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).

I first learned Vim in university and, since then, it has been a welcome companion for the majority of my software engineering career.

Practical distributed applications are deployed into varied environments and execute on a variety of different machines linked together over a variety of communication infrastructure.

A central tenet of databases is that any committed data survives a crash or a failure.

Every so often I get stuck with a running process that’s using a specific port, preventing me from running some new application that uses the same port.

When people describe progress, they often describe it in terms of a linear progression taking us from primitive to advanced — an idea or invention occurs as a singular event, and somewhere further down the line of time a new idea or invention completely r…

In the book “Thinking in Systems”, Donella Meadows dedicates an entire chapter to explaining why functioning systems seem to work so well.

Java was the first programming language I was taught at University, and the language I used for the first decade of my career.

One of the core features of modern Java is lambda expressions.