neurons firing from a keyboard

Using Lima and Bash dotfiles to go fast with Claude Code

Thu, 26 Mar 2026 15:30:36 -0500

I’ve been using Lima for years to run Docker and Podman on the Mac. This setup has given me a lot of control over how I set up my VMs that the “Desktop” tools often obscure. I also like being able to store my VMs in my eternally-growing dotfiles repo. Though I started messing with Claude Code last year, between not being happy with how purely vibe-coding my Status tool was going and, as usual, Life Getting In The Way™, I ended up scrapping it.

CNCF Weekly #1: Flux

Wed, 29 Oct 2025 13:41:00 -0600

I’m starting off CNCF Weekly with Flux, a useful and well-known tool in the cloud-native community. Key Info Project Name Flux CNCF Status Graduated Docs Link GitHub Link In a nutshell… Flux enables Kubernetes clusters and their apps to be configured with Git. Time to retire your Jenkins pipelines. Who’s This For? Platform engineers and developers interested in maintaining clusters and their apps completely as code with Git Engineering managers looking for new tools to add to their arsenal Okay, so what is it?

CNCF Weekly

Tue, 28 Oct 2025 12:07:33 -0500

I was thinking about the projects in the CNCF the other day. I’ve shown some variant of this image countless times in customer calls, demos, and presentations, but never really stopped to think about how hilariously vast this landscape is. As anyone who’s used Kubernetes for more than two weeks will tell you, you don’t keep up — you just pick the same five tools that everyone else did and make a career out of it.

Carlos learns to vibe code, Day 2: well, s***.

Sun, 10 Aug 2025 16:48:24 -0500

Day 0 Day 1 Day 2 ⬅️ you are here So here’s the original prompt for Status. And it just, umm, did it?????? Your browser doesn't support embedded videos, but don't worry, you can download it and watch it with your favorite video player!

Carlos learns to vibe code, Day 1: real humans only

Sat, 09 Aug 2025 20:36:00 -0500

Day 0 Day 1 ⬅️ you are here So, Day 1 was super productive! I signed up for Claude! Yay! Signing Up Signing up was a process. To minimize the number of times my personal data gets sold and, unavoidably, leaked to search engines, I use a combination of Ironvest or Fastmail’s Masked Email feature, throwaway phone numbers from SMSpool and Privacy cards to sign up for services I might not keep long term.

Carlos learns to vibe code, Day 0: i succumb to the slop

Sat, 09 Aug 2025 13:06:58 -0500

Day 0 ⬅️ you are here Day 1 So, I don’t like LLMs. I’m optimistically terrified of their long-term impact to society. I also know that I’ve grown to like stuff that I’ve held strongly-negative opinions on, like vim (which I used to write this), Ruby (which was my preferred language for many years), Kubernetes (I was a huge Kubernetes hater when it first got popular!) and Golang. Two weeks using nothing but the thing was enough for me to either become a zealot or remain a life-long hater.

I'm Carlos!

Wed, 22 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I’m a software developer and DevSecOps enthusiast. Brooklyn-born, Houston-based. I enjoy helping businesses reach their customers and respond to competition faster with less risk and more awesome. Focus Areas Implementing DevSecOps in challenging places Reliability Engineering Cloud- and Container-Native. carlosinhtx

You probably don't need Husky

Fri, 04 Oct 2024 09:43:20 +0000

Git hooks are an incredible and incredibly simple way of fixing loose ends before you commit and/or push your code without installing additional software. Unfortunately, like most of the Git CLI, they can appear difficult and un-approachable at first glance. For one, they assume that you’re storing your scripts within the hidden and un-tracked .git directory! I hope you like symlinks! Lots of projects use tools like Husky as an easier-to-use alternative that’s easy to scale across teams and very friendly within CI.

Debugging OAuth authorization tokens from your terminal

Tue, 31 Oct 2023 10:51:08 -0500

Here’s a quick post about something that I don’t do often but is typically a pain when I do: debugging OAuth tokens super quickly. An Example Scenario You’ve just provisioned a shiny new Keycloak instance and want to make it the upstream identity provider (IdP) to your company’s Okta tenant because you were volun-told to do so. You’re also using an app that is configured to do single sign-on through Keycloak and will only log in users if they have admin in their access token’s groups claim.

How to empty an AWS Routed53 Hosted Zone with AWS CLI

Mon, 30 Oct 2023 11:48:47 -0500

So you’re managing an AWS VPC with Terraform or something like that, but some other pesky thing decided to add Route53 records that Terraform doesn’t know about. As a result, when you try to delete the zone with Terraform, you’re no longer able to because of this: │ Error: deleting Route53 Hosted Zone (REDACTED): HostedZoneNotEmpty: The specified hosted zone contains non-required resource record sets and so cannot be deleted. │ status code: 400, request id: REDACTED Ughh.

Troubleshooting Kubernetes Namespaces That Won't Delete

Thu, 26 Oct 2023 11:00:00 +0000

Usually, deleting Kubernetes namespaces is easy: kubectl delete ns delete-me Sometimes, however, deleting them takes way longer than expected… kubectl delete ns delete-me # still deleting, two months later... This quick “way longer than I acutally ever thought possible” post shows you a few troubleshooting tricks for dealing with this. Forget everything you know about the word “all” kubectl delete --all -n delete-me is a lie. While the kubectl delete man page suggests that “–all” means “all”:

Render Golang templates with a timeout

Fri, 04 Mar 2022 11:27:30 +0000

Situation You’re writing a Go program that renders arbitrary Go templates that users can write. Since they are arbitrary, you want to prevent users from accidentally DDoSing your program by using long-running template functions. Something like this: import ( "os" "template" ) // Perhaps this is exposed through an interface that a // third-party API implements, for example. func LongRunningFunction(s string) { time.Sleep(100000000) // This takes forever return s } func main() { tmpl := `Hello, {{ .

Run ARM Docker images in GitHub Actions runners!

Mon, 17 Jan 2022 16:53:00 +0000

This is so easy to do, I think I can describe it in less than 150 words! Problem: You want to run Docker images from Docker images that target ARM, or you want to build images for ARM platforms. Solution: Add this to .github/workflows/main.yml (or whichever YAML file you’d like to enable ARM support for): jobs: your-job-name: steps: # Add this to the top of your `steps` - name: Set up QEMU - arm if: ${{ runner.

Scraping without JavaScript using Chromium on AWS Lambda: The Novel

Mon, 10 Jan 2022 22:07:00 +0000

UPDATE: 2022-01-17 16:33 CST Forget the below. Just do this instead! UPDATE: 2022-01-15 16:43 CST It appears that Docker as configured within the runners provided by GitHub Actions do not native support building ARM images. However, you can use qemu-user-static to emulate instructions for other CPU architectures to get around this. This image uses binfmt_misc to tell the host’s Linux kernel to tell a third-party application (in this case, qemu) to execute binaries in formats that it doesn’t recognize.

Using a Mac and burned by Docker Desktop? Use Lima instead!

Mon, 22 Nov 2021 15:12:00 +0000

UPDATE 2021-12-28 16:54:00 CST If you’re getting weird networking or security errors from your Docker containers, your VM’s time might need to be updated. You can fix this by running this command: docker run --rm --privileged alpine hwclock -s You’re probably not going to want to run this manually every time your time goes out of sync. Run this automatically by adding this command to your computer’s crontab: echo '0 * * * * docker run --rm --privileged alpine hwclock -s` > \ /etc/crontabs/root In August, Docker/Mirantis has changed their licensing model to require businesses with more than 250 employees and $10M in revenue to pay for Docker Desktop.

Talks I've Given

Fri, 28 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I enjoy giving talks to Meetups and conferences all over the United States. Here are some that I’ve done. Want me to talk at your event? E-mail me at dev@carlosnunez.me! May 28, 2021. DockerCon Live 2021: Panelist on Easy CI with Docker (free login required) April 24, 2020. Contino CloudFest: Boost Your Apps with an SRE Approach to Development October 4, 2018. Taco About It: Getting Into DevOps December 13, 2017.

How to SRE-ify your React app with Prometheus

Tue, 14 Apr 2020 20:41:34 +0000

I am not a JavaScript developer. However, I was given a task at work recently that forced me to enter the abyss and get good at keeping my Promises. I was asked to create a webinar on helping developers become better SREs through observability and instrumentation. The objective was to take a broken web app and add enough monitoring and logging to it to make troubleshooting its brokenness easier. (I’ll update this post with a link when we broadcast it on April 22nd!

A few tips on successful remote value stream maps.

Tue, 07 Apr 2020 17:18:19 +0000

There is no doubt that the worldwide COVID-19 crisis has been a wet blanket for digital transformation across the enterprise. However, I don’t know about you, but I’m super fortunate that this is happening in 2020’s technological landscape instead of, say, 2010’s. With video conferencing solutions that work with even the slowest and least reliable internet connections and real-time collaboration tools that scale to hundreds of people per session, many of today’s key activities that required an office only five years ago can be done from the comfort of our own homes or apartments.

Want to test Ansible playbooks that require systemd in Docker? Try this.

Wed, 05 Feb 2020 11:30:00 +0000

Kubernetes and other cloud-native strategies might be putting configuration management out to pasture, but I found myself writing a playbook recently while learning how to create infrastructure as code for Azure. I needed to start my Flask web server and Postgres database with systemd, which isn’t a pattern that’s easily supported by Docker. I got this working with Docker Compose, however, and this post will show you how! Create a Docker Compose file with the following services: version: '2.

Story Points Aren't Units of Time

Tue, 16 Jul 2019 23:45:29 +0000

They just aren’t. WHY Search for “story points agile” on Google. Try it. You don’t even have to type it into Google; click the link! You’ll get, at this time of writing, approximately 12 million results. Accouting for the 8 million results are bots promoting something that requires your wallet, that leaves four million web pages, many of which will go on to describe story points to the letter and how they aren’t about estimation.

SRE and BDD: The Ultimate Power Pair

Fri, 12 Apr 2019 23:50:00 +0000

The responsibilities of a Reliability Engineer are well understood: maintain a high degree of service availability so that customers can have a consistently enjoyable and predictable experience. How these goals are accomplished — establishing SLOs with customers, enforcing them through monitoring SLIs and exercising the platform against failure through Game Days — is also well understood. Much of the literature that exists on SRE goes into great depths talking about these concepts, and for good reason: failing to establish a contract with the customer on availability expectations for the service that they are paying for is a great way for its engineers to spend their entire careers fire-fighting.

SRE Communities vs SRE Centers of Excellence

Tue, 19 Mar 2019 01:23:00 +0000

I read Google’s Site Reliability Engineering Workbook on a flight to New York the other day. I read their original book when it came out two years ago and was curious to see how much of it mirrored my own (brief) experience as a Google SRE. Given that it’s been a while since I did pure SRE work, I wanted to keep my skills caught up, and the Workbook seemed like a more accurate reference to follow.

Is your Java app ready for Docker? Take this super quick test!

Tue, 19 Mar 2019 00:57:07 +0000

Here’s a really quick test to see if your enterprise Java app is ready for Docker. NOTE: I am not a Java developer; more like a casual observer. Get your pitchforks ready! If I can’t do this: $> docker run --rm --volume "$PWD:/app" --volume "$HOME/.m2:/root/.m2" \ --tty maven:3.6.0-jdk$WHICHEVER_VERSION-alpine mvn build $> docker run --rm --volume "$PWD:/app" --tty openjdk:$WHICHEVER_VERSION-jdk-alpine \ java -jar /path/to/war.war Then either: Your application is not 12-factor and is probably not ready for Docker, Your source code has hidden dependencies that live outside of your pom.

Move Fast And Retain Corporate Governance with Pull Requests

Sun, 24 Feb 2019 17:47:23 +0000

DevOps and change control mix like oil and water. Product and development teams want to experiment with and release ideas as quickly as their customers request them, and do so with tight, but unstructured, collaboration across organizations. On the other hand, corporate governance wants auditability, transparent risk mitigation and justification in every step of the way. Consequently, both of these sides often don’t get along with each other well, hindering development speed in the progress.

Good Tools Are Important. Ignore At Your Own Peril

Tue, 19 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been consulting for some of the world’s largest companies for the last three years and have observed three themes that worry me: Agile is a really controversial word, despite the manifesto being quite clear on the matter, Somewhere within every company, there are many, many engineers that have been waiting weeks for test environments, and Engineers have the heaviest, plasticky-iest, and most unpleasant machines in the entire organization This (hopefully) brief post is about that third point.

neurons are firing again! How I eat my own dogfood with my blog.

Wed, 13 Feb 2019 01:31:09 +0000

First, huge shout out to the five of you that actually read stuff from my WordPress blog! You might have noticed that, with the exception of a a few posts for my company, I’ve been mostly silent. I haven’t given up on writing; quite the contrary, in fact! I haven’t run out of neurons to fire either (darn!). I’ve stopped writing on my own site for one reason: I pledged to not write again until I was completely out of WordPress.

How To Make Enterprise Container Strategies That Last, Part I

Mon, 26 Nov 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Intro I was in high school when I got introduced to this weird app called VMware Workstation. I thought the idea of using your Windows machine to run other machines was really compelling - a perfect fit of my younger and geekier self. You couldn’t pay me enough back then to believe that almost all[^1] of the world’s most important applications would eventually run on virtual machines…on someone else’s computers! I really liked the idea, but Workstation was a bit of a bear to use at the time and the virtual machines it created were quite slow.

Getting output from Docker containers from within Ansible

Fri, 20 Jul 2018 17:07:20 +0000

The Problem

You want to use Ansible’s docker_container module to do stuff, but want to also perform actions based on their output without specifying a logging driver or writing to a temp file.

The Solution

Do this:

A Few Gotchas About Going Multi-Cloud with AWS, Microsoft Azure and HashiCorp tools.

Tue, 21 Nov 2017 00:53:14 +0000

One of the more interesting types of work we do at Contino is help our clients make sense of the differences between AWS and Microsoft Azure. While the HashiCorp toolchain (Packer, Terraform, Vault, Vagrant, Consul and Nomad) have made provisioning infrastructure a breeze compared to writing hundreds of lines of Python, they almost make achieving a multi-cloud infrastructure deployment seem too easy.

This post will outline some of the differences I’ve observed with using these tools against both cloud platforms. As well, since I used the word “multi-cloud” in my first paragraph, I’ll briefly discuss some general talking points on “things to consider” before embarking on a multi-cloud journey at the end.

Provisioning VMware Workstation Machines from Artifactory with Vagrant

Thu, 11 May 2017 04:09:15 +0000

I wrote a small Vagrantfile and helper library for provisioning VMware VMs from boxes hosted on Artifactory. I put this together with the intent of helping us easily provision our Rancher/Cattle/Docker-based platform wholesale on our machines to test changes before pushing them up.

Here it is: https://github.com/carlosonunez/vagrant_vmware_artifactory_example

Tests are to be added soon! I’m thinking Cucumber integration tests with unit tests on the helper methods and Vagrantfile correctness.

Getting Into DevOps.

Thu, 02 Mar 2017 03:58:15 +0000

I’ve observed a sharp uptick of developers and systems administrators interested in “getting into DevOps” within the last year or so. This pattern makes sense, too: in an age where a single developer can spin up a globally-distributed infrastructure for an application with a few dollars and a few API calls, the gap between development and systems administration is closer than ever. While I’ve seen plenty of blog posts and articles about cool DevOps tools and thoughts to think about, I’ve seen fewer content on pointers and suggestions for people looking to get into this work.

My goal with this article is to, hopefully, draw what that path looks like. My thoughts are based upon several interviews, chats, late-night discussions on reddit.com/r/devops and random conversation, likely over beer and delicious food. I’m also interested in hearing feedback from those that have made the jump; if you have, please email me. I’d love to hear your thoughts and stories.

Wiring up Docker on Windows to Ubuntu on Windows

Mon, 12 Dec 2016 18:05:37 +0000

Getting docker running on Ubuntu on Windows is pretty simple. After installing the Docker Windows engine and restarting, run this in a bash session to bind the two together:

export DOCKER_HOST=tcp://0.0.0.0:2375

Pop this into your .bashrc and never think about it again.

Start small; move fast

Fri, 14 Oct 2016 01:04:29 +0000

Seinfeld wasn’t always the heavily-syndicated network cash cow it is today. The hit show started as an experiment for Jerry and Larry David. They wanted to write a show to describe the life of a comedian in New York, namely, Jerry’s. Despite Jerry’s limited acting and writing experience, they wrote their pilot in the late 1980’s and sold it as “The Jerry Chronicles,” which NBC made its first national appearance of on July 1989.

I’ll spare you the details, but eventually the crew found their beat and, shortly afterwards, historic levels of success. but I will say this: every episode of Seinfeld was based off of, and written by, a personal story from someone on its writing staff. Compared to the sitcom-by-committee shows that prevailed during the time, this was a small, but drastic, change that eventually made its way into the mainstream. (For example, every cast member on The Office, a favorite of mine, wrote their own episode; some more than once.)

Winning at Ansible: How to manipulate items in a list!

Thu, 25 Feb 2016 19:07:54 +0000

The Problem

Ansible is a great configuration management platform with a very, very extensible language for expressing yoru infrastructure as code. It works really well for common workflows (deploying files, adding authorized_keys, creating new EC2 instances, etc), but its limitations become readily apparent as you begin embarking in more custom and complex plays.

Here’s a quick example. Let’s say you have a playbook that uses a variable (or var in Ansible-speak) that contains a list of tables, like this:

Sleep better with two simple shortcuts.

Mon, 21 Dec 2015 00:43:59 +0000

TL;DR:

Control + ⌘ + Shift + G Home button triple-click.

Why?

Exposing ourselves to bright screens at night while checking our Facebook feed or reddit posts might not be as harmless as it seems. Tons of research, like this and this suggest that viewing things on bright screens right before bed makes our brains think that we’re in daylight longer than we actually are and, consequently, prevent us from falling asleep sooner than we should be. This combined with our early-start culture has been shown to lead to fatigue, decreased concentration and, in some folks, depression.

Additionally, other research has shown that prolonged exposure to artificial light (like those in most offices or our phones) can, over time, damage our eyes’ ability to adjust to incoming light and weaken their sensitivity to it.

I didn’t notice any of this until a Slashdot post introduced me to Flux several years ago. Before using this application, I was usually tired and sore (I rode my bike much more often back then) most of the time, but didn’t think much of it. I went out often back then, and most of the people I came across were just as or more tired than I was, so I thought I was fine.

You're a better engineer than you think.

Wed, 02 Dec 2015 05:22:53 +0000

I was quite surprised to discover that thousands of people were members of the “Imposter Syndrome” Google+ group within my first month at Google.

I always thought that getting into Google was probably the best social proof of “making it” that an engineer could receive. The interview process is hard, gruelingly technical, relatively unforgiving and riddled with rollercoasters; many incredibly talented Googlers had to go through the process two or more times before getting in for good. (I went through it twice…sort of.) The engineering talent at Google is nearly limitless; many of the world’s most formidable and accomplished computer scientists, sysadmins and software engineers work or worked at Google doing all sorts of things.

So imagine my surprise when literally tons of engineers join a group expressing how they feel as if they aren’t good enough to be at Google or working alongside people with Wikipedia articles written after them. Perhaps it was a big joke that completely went with my head, but given the many, many internal jokes made about not being good enough to be a Googler that I came across (mostly thanks to Memegen), I had my doubts.

A completely neutral post about containers.

Mon, 30 Nov 2015 20:36:01 +0000

Edit 2: I’ve made a few small changes to the way I’ve described Docker architecture. Thanks, /u/jmtd!
Edit: I mentioned below that Docker containers can only run a single process. While that is true by default, it is actually not the rule. You can use Docker Supervisor to manage multiple processes within a container. Here is how you do that. Thanks, /u/carlivar!

Fact: There are at least 22 conversations arguing about the usefulness/uselessness of containers happening right now. For every person arguing about them, at least three blog articles will shortly appear telling you why containers are going to be bigger than the Super Bowl or how they are the worst thing to happen to computing since web scale became a thing.

This short post will not be any of those.

I believe in using the right tool for the job and I hate fads. I’ve also been learning about containers for the last few months and am becoming incredibly interested in figuring out how to bring them to Windows 2012 and below (Windows Server 2016+ will have them, but Microsoft will be lucky and probably scared if they saw anything above 20-30% uptake within its first two years), so here’s a short post describing what I’ve learned about them, how they work, and why they might or might not be useful for you and/or your business.

Concurrency is a terrible name.

Sat, 28 Nov 2015 19:12:45 +0000

I was discussing the power of Goroutines a few days ago with a fellow co-worker. Naturally, the topic of “doing things at the same time in fancy ways” came up. In code, this is usually expressed by the async or await keywords depending on your language of choice. I told him that I really liked how Goroutines abstracts much of the grunt work in sharing state across multiple threads. As nicely as he possibly could, he responded with:

You know nothing! Goroutines don’t fork threads!

This sounded ludicrous to me. I (mistakenly) thought that concurrency == parallelism because doing things “concurrently” usually means doing them at the same time simultaneously, i.e. what is typically described as being run in parallel. Nobody ever says “I made a grilled cheese sandwich in parallel to waiting for x.” So I argued how concurrency is all about multithreading while he argued that concurrency is all about context switching. This small, but friendly, argument invited a few co-workers surrounding us, and much ado about event pumps were made.

Doing something boring? Try this one weird trick! Slackers hate it!

Tue, 15 Sep 2015 19:08:11 +0000

I love writing code and building awesome stuff, but there are times where fighting the urge to Reddit for 14 hours feels like this:

When this happens, I break out my secret weapon: *The Pomodoro Technique. *The basic premise behind this technique is alternating your time between spending several minutes on nothing but working towards a certain goal (let’s call it the hot period) or deliverable and a few minutes on anything that isn’t work (*the cold period). *

for vs foreach vs "foreach"

Mon, 14 Sep 2015 16:29:55 +0000

Many developers and sysadmins starting out with Powershell will assume that this:

$arr = 1..10
$arr2 = @()
foreach ($num in $arr) { $arr2 += $num + 1 }
write-output $arr2

is the same as this:

$arr = 1..10
$arr2 = @()
for ($i = 0; $i -lt $arr.length; $i++) { $arr2 += $arr[$i] + $i }
write-output $arr2

or this:

$arr = 1..10
$arr2 = @()
$arr | foreach { $arr2 += $_ + 1 }

Just like those Farmers Insurance commercials demonstrate, they are not the same. It’s not as critical of an error as, say, mixing up Write-Output with Write-Host (which I’ll explain in another post), but knowing the difference between the two might help your scripts perform better and give you more flexibility in how you do certain things within them.

You’ll also get some neat street cred. You can never get enough street cred.

BYOD Part 1: Computers In The Cloud

Fri, 04 Sep 2015 13:28:22 +0000

Computing is expensive. Desktops and laptops cost lots of money. Printers cost even more money. (Printers are really funny, actually; buying one or two isn’t so bad, but once you’re managing tens or hundreds or more laser printers and printing hundreds or thousands of pages per day, the cost of toner/ink and repair skyrocket like a SpaceX shuttle.) Desks cost even more money. Accessories cost even more money. The list goes on and on,infinitum ad nauseum.

Now that we live in an age where downloading high-def movies takes less time than starting up your car, leveraging the cloud and having people bring in their own devices has become a highly lucrative alternative. The bring-your-own-device, or BYOD, movement has picked up a lot of steam over the years, so much so that Gartner expects for “half of the world’s companies” to enact it. Over a billion devices are expected to be using BYOD by 2018, and as more and larger companies begin to take advantage of cloud computing, this trend will only accelerate.

I’ll spend the next three posts talking about three key components of most BYOD environment:

Virtual desktops,
Laptops and desktops, and
Mobile phones and tablets

I’ll explain who the major players involved with each component are, their importance in BYOD and some things to watch out for during considerations.

Is it actually possible to have an empty inbox? Try this and find out!

Mon, 24 Aug 2015 12:48:02 +0000

I’ve developed a system over the years that has kept my inbox mostly empty all of the time. It has worked for me even when I was getting 100+ emails/day, so I’d say it scales fairly well. It also works well even in the absence of Gmail’s additional feature set (I use Office 365 personally, but this worked when I used Gmail, Apple Mail and my own mail servers back in the day.), which is nice should you ever choose to use a desktop mail client.

This might not work for you. You might even be doing some variation of this already. If that’s the case, feel free to tell me off!

Finally, if you don’t want to worry about any of this stuff and don’t ever see yourself having to use Outlook or Mail.app ever again, try Google’s Inbox and tell me that all of this is useless in the comments!

Without further ado, this is how I email:

Technical Thursdays: DNS, or why using the Internet is kind of like going to Starbucks

Fri, 21 Aug 2015 17:51:38 +0000

This Thursday, we’ll talk about a system that has been extremely critical (and extremely taken for granted) for shaping the Internet as we know it: the domain name system, or DNS for short.

Before I explain what DNS is, I’ll talk about something I try really hard to hate but ultimately can’t: Starbucks.

I go to Starbucks at least once a day. Given that Google has more coffee machines (and baristas!) sitting idle than my handy downstairs Starbucks does on even their busiest days, this is slightly embarrassing to admit. I love their drinks, but as a recovering coffee snob, I passive-aggressively hate that I love their drinks. My relationship with that Seattle staple is kind of like how a lot of people feel about Taylor Swift: they’ll hate on her forever but will never admit to playing 1989 on repeat.

Wait, that’s just me?

Okay. I can live with that.

Technical Thursdays: Calculate Directory Sizes Stupidly Fast With PowerShell.

Fri, 14 Aug 2015 00:03:40 +0000

Scenario

A file share that a group in your business is dependent on is running out of space. As usual, they have no idea why they’re running out of space, but they need you, the sysadmin, to fix it, and they need it done yesterday.

This has been really easy for Linux admins for a long time now: Do this

du -h / | sort -nr

and delete folders or files from folders at the top that look like they want to be deleted.

Windows admins haven’t been so lucky…at least those that wanted to do it on the command-line (which is becoming increasingly important as Microsoft focuses more on promoting Windows Server Core and PowerShell). `

One weird trick that might make your MacBook less janky

Sat, 08 Aug 2015 00:20:28 +0000

I was trying to put a bunch of slides together today but had a lot of trouble doing it because my Mac would freeze up every minute or so for about 10-15 seconds. If you’ve ever tried mowing a lawn with no gas, you kind of know how this feels. It was infuriating.

In search of anything that might improve the state of things, I stumbled upon this interesting solution that seems to have made the slowness go away!

If your Mac is freezing up or acting slow in general, give this a try:

Technical Tuesdays: Powershell Pipelines vs Socks on Amazon

Wed, 05 Aug 2015 04:50:53 +0000

In Powershell, a typical, run-of-the-mill pipeline looks something like this:

Get-ChlidItem ~ | ?{$_.LastWriteTime -lt $(Get-Date 1/1/2015)} | Format-List -Auto

but really looks like this when written in .NET (C# in this example):

If Your Business Still Uses Servers, You’re (Probably) Doing It Wrong

Tue, 04 Aug 2015 17:55:43 +0000

Your servers are useless, and you should sell them.

Many businesses small and large buy servers for many wrong reasons. Some businesses want a server for an application they wrote. Some others want to keep their data “private.” Others still want servers for “better speed.” All of these reasons are wrong. There are only three reasons that I can think of that justify the purchase of physical servers (feel free to list more in the comments!):

A regulator your business is beholden to requires it,
Your app really does need that kind of performance (read on to find out if this is you), and
You have a strong passion for burning money.