Hi there! 👋

Big Idea I am getting to the stage of my career now where I have started picking up guiding principles that guide my socio-technical endeavors. I am sure I will continue to learn more and add them here or come back revise these with more wisdom and insight but what I want to start here is a collection of tenets. These tenets are not implementation details or design patterns but are more like paradigms for how we relate to problems, the natural systems that emerge from people thrown into teams, and more....

Big Idea The goal of this post will be to capture the steps required for the backup and restore process of my TrueNAS server. Currenty, my TrueNAS server consists of two 4TB drives in a vdev with a RAID1 (Mirror) config. My goal is to back this up to Backblaze’s S3-compatible B2 storage and test recovery before migrating data out of my old 1TB SSD. Once I have these backups in places the 3-2-1 rule will be satisfied:...

Big Idea I have been studying more systems desing more intentionally lately and this is the fruit of one evening of diagramming out a URL Shortner design. This post doesn’t explain much but a picture’s worth a thousand words!

Big Idea Zettabit File System (ZFS) is a file system that is very popular in the Homelab community for it’s powerful capabilities as a file system and volume manager. It is designed to ensure data integrity and scalbility. While I am not an expert in ZFS, I hope to create guide here that outlines some of the fundamantal concepts of ZFS that I can return to over time. ZFS has a few key features that I will outline here:...

Big Idea Dependency Injection (the ‘D’ in SOLID design principles) is an important practice in good software architecture. When used well, it decouples a class’s dependency on a certain interface from any one particular implementation of that dependency. This means that any class which implements the common interface of the dependency can be injected into the class at runtime for easy configuration. This is especially helpful when it comes to creating stubs for mocking when writing unit tests....

Big Idea Autoscaling is a key technology that builds on the elasticity of distributed cloud computing. To understand autoscaling in the Kubernetes environment, it will be important to understand the basic enabling technologies: containerization and distributed computing. By leveraging hese two technologies, Kubernetes supports horizontal pod autoscaling (hpa) and cluster autoscaling. In this post I will dive into some brief background on Containerization and distributed computing (just enough to be dangerous) and then take a more focused look at the horizontal autoscaling functionality of Kubernetes....

Big Idea The goal of this post will be to give an overview of IPv4 addresses. My aim is to do this incrementally by first covering the anatomy of an IPv4 address in its base 10 and binary representations. Second, I will look at CIDR block subnetting and subnet masks. Thirdly, I will append some helpful formulas for working with IP addresses. Background & History Before diving into the anatomy of IPv4 let’s turn back the page....

Big Idea I was recently tasked with configuring automated load tests to validate the health of a service under load and to identify bottlenecks and limits at which the service became overloaded. Up until this point, I had not worked first-hand with any load-testing frameworks. Although there are many great load testing tools out there like JMeter, K6s, and Locust, I decided to get started with Locust as it is a framework I had heard of before and is a pure Python framework (Python is the language I think in right now)....

Big Idea In part 1 of this post, I covered the basics of getting started building my Kubernetes cluster on Raspberry Pis. In particular, I laid out my goals and requirements, the build list, the network topology and setup, and the installation of K3s on each of the nodes. I recommend going back and checking out that post first if you haven’t already (Part 1: Building a Bare-metal Kubernetes Cluster on Raspberry Pis)....

Big Idea From the start of my career, I have been fascinated by Kubernetes. I love distributed systems and the rich history of how we have arrived where we are today with distributed computing. We live in the ongoing evolution of our communal vision for cloud computing. In the early years, the vision was to present a homogenous Unix-like interface for managing an underlying collection of servers such as BOINC. Now, we live in the world of many small virtualized unix environments distributed across servers and sharing compute....