Recent content in Code, Coffee & Chaos on taihen.org / 418 ... engineering in progress
Last year I wrote about distroless containers and finished with a small brag: I build my own minimal base image with apko and Wolfi , look how tiny it is, look how few packages it has. This year I held that image against the standards that serious hardened-image vendors compete on. It failed. Not because of what was inside the image. The contents were fine. Six packages, no shell, non-root user,…
Early in my career, I assumed everyone worked the same way I did. I thought “professional” meant universal and that technical rigor transcended culture. I was not just incorrect, I was naively wrong . I’ve spent about twenty-five years working in infrastructure engineering, almost always in multinational distributed teams. I’ve been the formal manager of an infrastructure…
I didn’t sign up to be a project manager. I got into programming because I loved the exploration, making mistakes, finding solutions and moving slowly bit by bit. One day I needed system tool then I wrote some C, the other time I needed some glue code, so I got comfortable with Perl or Bash. Needed to created website? Well… PHP was the languge for it - basically whatever was up to the…
One of the things I care deeply about is helping other engineers grow . Over the last year, I’ve had a lot of conversations, some with folks just entering the field, others with seasoned pros, asking the same question: how is AI going to reshape our work? There is fear and uncertainty, but also some optimism. There’s a rhythm to these tech cycles. I’ve seen it before, big promises, huge hype,…
Ever found yourself knee-deep in a routing incident at 3 AM, frantically switching between terminals and browser tabs trying to piece together BGP data? I’ve been there . You’re chasing down a routing anomaly, your coffee’s gone cold, and you’re clicking through endless forms just to figure out which AS is announcing that suspicious prefix. What if I told you that instead…
If you’ve been in the container game for a while, you’ve probably seen a lot of buzz around “distroless” containers. The first time I heard the term, I pictured a container floating off into the void - no OS, no shell, just… code . Turns out, that’s not too far from the truth, but just like Serverless, Distroless is a misleading term! Let’s break down what distroless containers are, why you might…
I’m happy to announce a simple yet effective command-line DNS benchmarking tool I’ve recently developed: dns-benchmark . This project was directly inspired by the outstanding work of Steve Gibson and his well-known DNS Benchmark utility. Steve’s meticulous attention to detail in benchmarking DNS performance motivated me to create something similar, but tailored specifically for the…
As infrastructure engineers, we often find ourselves bridging gaps between the tools we use and the monitoring systems we rely on. When I’ve migrated to Prometheus and Grafana on one of the sites, integrating Accel-PPP posed a unique challenge. The absence of native Prometheus support for Accel-PPP meant I was stuck with an SNMP-based monitoring setup, but relying on SNMP for metrics felt…
Over my two decades as an infrastructure engineer, I’ve watched our field transform dramatically. What began with manual server configuration has evolved into defining entire organizations infrastructure as code. This journey reflects not just technological change, but a complete shift in how we approach managing systems at scale. I’ve been in the trenches through most of it, and I…
Who Am I? I’m a staff level infrastructure engineer with a affection for creating solutions and exploring new technologies. TL;DR I build systems for others. This site This is a collection of posts that I’ve written across the years. Most are gone, but some were worth to keep them. The Engineering Journey From placing servers under desks in the late 90s to designing and building hybrid…
Whether you have a question, feedback, or just want to say hello, feel free to reach out. Get In Touch LinkedIn Profile GitHub Profile Let’s Connect I’m always open to new opportunities and collaborations. Don’t hesitate to get in touch if you have any ideas or projects you’d like to discuss.
In Unix-like operating systems, dotfile is synonymous with hidden file. Usually used by programs to store configuration variables. I have multiple machines, which I regularly work on. I keep sync of a set of personalized dotfiles between them – customized settings for programs that I’m using, like many of you. Till now, I was using my private git repository for things like my private scripts, Mutt…
Back in 1994, a new Internet Protocol was in the works - Internet Protocol next generation (IPng) - which eventually became IPv6 . The goal was to have it up and running by 1996, with the idea that by the time IPv4 addresses ran out, everyone would already be using IPv6. Well… that didn’t quite go as planned. As of last year (2012), global adoption of IPv6 only just hit 1% .
I found above message in a kernel log and I was just wondering what is all about. I was amazed how little I knew about it. A leap second is a second, as measured by an atomic clock, added to or subtracted from UTC to make it agree with astronomical time to within 0.9 second. It compensates for slowing in the Earth’s rotation and is added during the end of June or December. The first leap second…
On the day of my birthday, I wondered (of course - as many us do), if this is my start date, what is the to origin story of the birth date of computer time? The Unix epoch, defined as 00:00:00 UTC on January 1, 1970, serves as the foundational reference point for timekeeping in nearly all modern computing systems. This date, though seemingly arbitrary, emerged from a confluence of technical…