Engineering Jobs I Might Apply For
What makes an engineering job ad I'd apply for?
Kartar.Net
James Turnbull's blog about technology, monitoring, and more
Latest posts
Aliases I Have Known, 2026 Edition
Revisiting my shell aliases five years on.
My Nix Setup
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.
Fooder - Tinder, But For Dinner
A two-person swipe app for deciding what is for dinner, because asking out loud was clearly not an option.
decruft - A Rust Readability Tool
A utility for extracting readable content from web pages.
How Will New Engineers Learn to Code?
In an AI world, how will engineers learn to code?
Functions I have known
Why shell functions beat aliases for anything beyond simple substitution, with examples I use for git, docker, kubernetes, and JSON
Open Source Documentation
A practical guide to bootstrapping open source documentation through a solid README, issue-driven structure, and a static site generator
Merit and Mentoring
Offering chats and mentoring on Merit for engineers early in their careers or moving into senior and leadership roles
Hiring For Eng Managers
Multi-part series on hiring for eng managers
Aliases I have known
Sharing some of the shell aliases I've collected over the years for directories, disks, networking, Git, Kubernetes, and more
Investment decisions when building developer communities
Splitting developer relations investment between passive members, who need content and docs, and active members, who need higher-bandwidth engagement
Sonic the search engine
Trying out Sonic, a lightweight Rust search backend, by running it in Docker and ingesting fake name data with a Ruby client
VPE and CTO - the first 90 days
A mind map covering four domains a new technical leader should explore in their first ninety days at a new organization
Using JSON Server for demos and prototypes
Setting up JSON Server to spin up a working REST API from a single JSON file for demos and prototypes without writing any code
A bit of a Vector
Trying out Vector, a Rust-based observability data router from Timber.io that aims to replace Logstash, Telegraf, and Fluent
Tilt
Walking through Tilt setup, a Tiltfile in Skylark, and running a Sinatra app against local Kubernetes with auto rebuild on changes
Draft
Installing and using Microsoft's Draft to scaffold Dockerfiles and Helm charts for local Kubernetes development of a Ruby Sinatra service
Skaffold
Installing Google's Skaffold and using its dev mode to iteratively build, deploy, and port forward a Ruby app on local Kubernetes
Garden
A walkthrough of installing Garden, defining a graph-based project with modules and services, and deploying it to a local Kubernetes cluster
Intro to Distributed Tracing
What distributed tracing is, why microservices need it, and a walk through traces, spans, OpenCensus, OpenTracing, Zipkin, and Jaeger
Building your first product road map
A structure for product road maps covering mission, themes, milestones, epics, and stories, plus a process for building them in a startup
That Tattoo
Launching That Tattoo, a site that interviews people about their tattoos, the backstory, and the tattoo artists behind them
Joining Microsoft
Leaving Empatico to lead a team of CTOs in residence at Microsoft, helping startups build product and shape Azure for their needs
Autojump
Using autojump to skip retyping long directory paths by maintaining a weighted database of the directories you cd into most
The fuck
Installing and configuring The Fuck to auto-correct mistyped shell commands, plus writing a custom rule for the Azure az binary
Bash
Multi-part series on bash
Ballerina
A walkthrough of Ballerina, a cloud-native programming language for building microservices and APIs, with a Docker deployment example
Working with Yakuake
Installing the Yakuake drop-down terminal on KDE and scripting tabs, splits, titles, and commands through its D-Bus API at autostart
Sending logs from AWS ECS using Logspout
Moving away from per-task awslogs configuration to a Logspout agent on each ECS instance, shipping Gelf events into Logstash and Elasticsearch
Prometheus
Walking through installing and configuring Prometheus to scrape time series data, query metrics, and trigger alerts on a local Docker daemon
The Packer Book
Announcing a hands-on book covering Packer installation, provisioning, Docker integration, infrastructure tests, pipelines, and plug-in development
Empatico
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
The Terraform Book open for pre-orders
Opening pre-orders for a hands-on Terraform book covering installation, provisioning, collaboration, multi-environment architecture, and infrastructure testing
The Terraform Book
Announcing a hands-on introduction to Terraform covering providers, provisioning, data sources, remote state, and integration with other tools
The Docker Book 1.12.2 released!
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
The Art of Monitoring released!
Announcing the release of my book on building modern monitoring with Riemann, Graphite, collectd, Logstash, and friends
Managing maintenance with Riemann
Suppressing Riemann alerts during planned work by injecting maintenance events into the index and wrapping notifications with a check function
Structured Logging
Why string based logs hurt machine consumption, and how to emit typed structured events from a Rails app with Lograge and Logstash-logger
So what exactly is a junior software engineer?
A look at sixty junior engineer job ads showing how degree requirements, years of experience, and overspecified skills shut out actual junior candidates
Travel tips
Twenty plus practical tips from years of flying covering manners, packing, charging, club memberships, seat choice, and treating crews well
Monitoring Survey 2015 - Data
Publishing the anonymised CSV source data from the 2015 monitoring survey for anyone who wants to do their own analysis
Monitoring Survey 2015 - Effectiveness
When checks get added, how many alerts go unanswered, and how widely configuration management is used in 2015 monitoring environments
Monitoring Survey 2015 - Metrics
Which tools respondents use to collect, store, and visualise metrics, and what they do with the data in the 2015 survey
Monitoring Survey 2015 - Environments
Server, cloud, network, application, and business logic coverage across respondents in the 2015 monitoring survey results
Monitoring Survey 2015 - Tools
Nagios still leads in 2015 with AWS CloudWatch, New Relic, and a surge of home grown tooling close behind
Monitoring Survey 2015 - Demographics
Comparing 2015 job roles, organisation sizes, and monitoring ownership against last year's results across 884 complete responses
Monitoring Survey 2015 - Background
Introducing the 15 questions and methodology behind the 2015 edition of the monitoring survey with 1,116 responses
The Art of Monitoring sample chapter
Announcing a free sample chapter from my new monitoring book, covering the installation and use of Riemann
Monitoring Survey 2015
Launching the second annual monitoring survey at Monitorama to track how the monitoring landscape has shifted over the past year