Kartar.Net

What makes an engineering job ad I'd apply for?

Revisiting my shell aliases five years on.

How I manage a Mac and Linux from a single Nix flake with deploy-rs for the remote boxes with sops and the Secure Enclave for secrets.

A two-person swipe app for deciding what is for dinner, because asking out loud was clearly not an option.

A utility for extracting readable content from web pages.

In an AI world, how will engineers learn to code?

Why shell functions beat aliases for anything beyond simple substitution, with examples I use for git, docker, kubernetes, and JSON

A practical guide to bootstrapping open source documentation through a solid README, issue-driven structure, and a static site generator

Offering chats and mentoring on Merit for engineers early in their careers or moving into senior and leadership roles

Multi-part series on hiring for eng managers

Sharing some of the shell aliases I've collected over the years for directories, disks, networking, Git, Kubernetes, and more

Splitting developer relations investment between passive members, who need content and docs, and active members, who need higher-bandwidth engagement

Trying out Sonic, a lightweight Rust search backend, by running it in Docker and ingesting fake name data with a Ruby client

A mind map covering four domains a new technical leader should explore in their first ninety days at a new organization

Setting up JSON Server to spin up a working REST API from a single JSON file for demos and prototypes without writing any code

Trying out Vector, a Rust-based observability data router from Timber.io that aims to replace Logstash, Telegraf, and Fluent

Walking through Tilt setup, a Tiltfile in Skylark, and running a Sinatra app against local Kubernetes with auto rebuild on changes

Installing Google's Skaffold and using its dev mode to iteratively build, deploy, and port forward a Ruby app on local Kubernetes

Installing and using Microsoft's Draft to scaffold Dockerfiles and Helm charts for local Kubernetes development of a Ruby Sinatra service

A walkthrough of installing Garden, defining a graph-based project with modules and services, and deploying it to a local Kubernetes cluster

What distributed tracing is, why microservices need it, and a walk through traces, spans, OpenCensus, OpenTracing, Zipkin, and Jaeger

A structure for product road maps covering mission, themes, milestones, epics, and stories, plus a process for building them in a startup

Launching That Tattoo, a site that interviews people about their tattoos, the backstory, and the tattoo artists behind them

Leaving Empatico to lead a team of CTOs in residence at Microsoft, helping startups build product and shape Azure for their needs

Using autojump to skip retyping long directory paths by maintaining a weighted database of the directories you cd into most

Installing and configuring The Fuck to auto-correct mistyped shell commands, plus writing a custom rule for the Azure az binary

Multi-part series on bash

A walkthrough of Ballerina, a cloud-native programming language for building microservices and APIs, with a Docker deployment example

Installing the Yakuake drop-down terminal on KDE and scripting tabs, splits, titles, and commands through its D-Bus API at autostart

Moving away from per-task awslogs configuration to a Logspout agent on each ECS instance, shipping Gelf events into Logstash and Elasticsearch

Walking through installing and configuring Prometheus to scrape time series data, query metrics, and trigger alerts on a local Docker daemon

Announcing a hands-on book covering Packer installation, provisioning, Docker integration, infrastructure tests, pipelines, and plug-in development

Joining a new not-for-profit edtech startup as CTO to build a platform that connects classrooms of 8 to 10 year-olds for collaborative learning

Opening pre-orders for a hands-on Terraform book covering installation, provisioning, collaboration, multi-environment architecture, and infrastructure testing

Announcing a hands-on introduction to Terraform covering providers, provisioning, data sources, remote state, and integration with other tools

Version 1.12.2 of The Docker Book is out, a near total rewrite for the Docker 1.12.1 release with refreshed examples and best practices

Announcing the release of my book on building modern monitoring with Riemann, Graphite, collectd, Logstash, and friends

Suppressing Riemann alerts during planned work by injecting maintenance events into the index and wrapping notifications with a check function

Why string based logs hurt machine consumption, and how to emit typed structured events from a Rails app with Lograge and Logstash-logger

A look at sixty junior engineer job ads showing how degree requirements, years of experience, and overspecified skills shut out actual junior candidates

Twenty plus practical tips from years of flying covering manners, packing, charging, club memberships, seat choice, and treating crews well

Publishing the anonymised CSV source data from the 2015 monitoring survey for anyone who wants to do their own analysis

When checks get added, how many alerts go unanswered, and how widely configuration management is used in 2015 monitoring environments

Which tools respondents use to collect, store, and visualise metrics, and what they do with the data in the 2015 survey

Server, cloud, network, application, and business logic coverage across respondents in the 2015 monitoring survey results

Nagios still leads in 2015 with AWS CloudWatch, New Relic, and a surge of home grown tooling close behind

Comparing 2015 job roles, organisation sizes, and monitoring ownership against last year's results across 884 complete responses

Introducing the 15 questions and methodology behind the 2015 edition of the monitoring survey with 1,116 responses

Announcing a free sample chapter from my new monitoring book, covering the installation and use of Riemann

Launching the second annual monitoring survey at Monitorama to track how the monitoring landscape has shifted over the past year