Welcome — and how this blog is wired together

Hi, and welcome. This is a short tour of the site, mostly so I have a reference for myself the next time I’m staring at a blank .md file at 11pm.

Why this blog exists

I’ve been doing platform / DevOps work long enough to notice the same problems keep showing up — usually with slightly different names. This is where I’ll write the lessons down so I (and hopefully you) don’t have to learn them from scratch the next time around.

Topics I’m planning to cover, roughly in order of how much it hurts:

• Kubernetes networking when it stops being “magic”
• Terraform module design that survives a second engineer
• Kafka in production: the boring parts that actually matter
• Observability that helps you sleep, not just look busy

What works in a post

Anything you’d normally do in Markdown works here.

Code blocks

Fenced code blocks get syntax highlighting in both light and dark themes, and a “Copy” button on hover:

# A throwaway one-liner that shouldn't be a one-liner
kubectl get pods -A \
  | awk '$4 != "Running" && NR > 1 {print $1, $2, $4}' \
  | column -t

apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
  name: blog
spec:
  replicas: 2
  selector:
    matchLabels:
      app: blog
  template:
    metadata:
      labels:
        app: blog
    spec:
      containers:
        - name: web
          image: ghcr.io/your-org/blog:latest
          ports:
            - containerPort: 8080

Inline code like kubectl rollout status also gets a chip style.

Quotes and emphasis

“Cattle, not pets.” — somebody who’d clearly never been on call when the cattle started failing readiness checks at the same time.

Use bold for the thing the reader will skim for, and italics sparingly.

Lists

A plain list:

• One thing
• Another thing
• A third thing, with a bit more text so it wraps to two lines and you can see how the line height feels at long-form length

A numbered list works the same way:

1. Reproduce the bug locally
2. Write a failing test
3. Fix the bug
4. Promise yourself you won’t skip step 2 next time

Tables

Tool	What I reach for it for	Pain level
Terraform	Provisioning anything that costs money	Medium
Helm	Templating Kubernetes manifests	High
Kustomize	Patching Kubernetes manifests	Medium
Argo CD	Reconciling clusters to git	Low

Images

Drop an image in src/assets/ and reference it like a normal Markdown image:

![A diagram of the boring deploy pipeline](../../assets/pipeline.png)

That’s the tour. The next post will be something useful — probably about Kubernetes pod priorities, because I just lost an afternoon to them.