Posts

There are specific skills which you should acquire early on in your life. These skills are the foundational skills. Everything you do after developing these skills becomes better, faster and easier. I call these skills Compounder Skills. Derived from the term “Compound Interest”. The idea is that once you are laced with a particular compounder skill, you can apply it in various fields of your life. An example of a compounder skill that most humans get exposed to is “school education”. The disadvantages of being unlettered are numerous viz. being dependent for information, gullible to most straightforward scams, the limited scope of jobs they can do, etc. ...

Yes, today’s topic is typing skills. I think not many people stress about it, but it is a very underrated skill, yet useful in our daily lives. I typed the most organic way anybody starts doing it. Look at the keyboard when you are typing and fix mistakes after looking at the monitor. I moved my hand around on the keyboard and only used index fingers to touch the keys as if other fingers were glued together away from the keyboard. I learned the QWERTY keyboard’s keys placement while playing GTA Vice City with a friend since I typed cheat codes. Although I was still looking at the keyboard and typing, I did not search for the keys. ...

If you are reading this, you are definitely a Knowledge Worker. As Knowledge Workers, we rely a lot on the information we know or have access to for our day to day work. Occasionally, we will do the same thing twice, face the situation more than once, want to read that reference or try to understand the insights mentioned in that one particular blog. How do you keep track of such information? How do you find such information again after you have researched it once?! You need a knowledge management system that aids you in revisiting such information. ...

Introduction I recently finished reading the book: “How Innovation Works: And Why It Flourishes in Freedom” by Matt Ridley. The book was published less than a year ago in May 2020, and it is a short read of fewer than four hundred pages. I am not sure how to categorise this book, it probably falls into business, science and/or technological history. While listening to Naval Ravikant’s podcast, I found this book when Matt Ridley, the author, was a guest in one episode. I was profoundly influenced by the introduction of the book I got in the podcast. ...

This blog is a recap of my old blog “Add new node to Kubernetes cluster with bootstrap token”. Like the aforementioned blog, we will look at how to enable TLS bootstrapping on an existing Kubernetes cluster at control plane level and add a new node (or modify existing ones) to the cluster using bootstrap tokens. At the end of this blog, you will learn what specific steps to take to enable TLS bootstrapping on any custom-built Kubernetes cluster. ...

This blog shows a simple set of commands to install a Kubernetes cluster on Flatcar Container Linux based machines using Kubeadm. You might wonder why this blog when one can go to the official documentation and follow the steps? Yep, you are right. You can choose to do that. But this blog has a collection of actions specific to Flatcar Container Linux. These steps have been tried and tested on Flatcar, so you don’t need to recreate and test them yourself. There are some nuances related to the read-only partitions of Flatcar, and this blog takes care of them at the control plane level and the CNI level both. ...

If you use exec in your container script, then the container or Kubernetes pod might exit after the command that is exec-ed into has exited. But if that’s what you wanted, then it’s okay. This blog tries to explain how to pass the signals to the applications, how they work differently when invoked uniquely and what to do if the application does handle them. What are the “Signals”? Signals are messages one process can send to another process, mostly used in UNIX like operating systems. ...

There are various ways to know about the release of your favourite new software, follow the mailing list, check the Github release page periodically, follow the project’s Twitter handle, etc. But do you know there is even more reliable way to track the releases of your favourite software released on Github. Github Releases and RSS feeds For every repository on Github, if the project is posting their releases, you can follow the RSS feed of that project’s release. The RSS feed link for any project’s release is: ...

PodSecurityPolicy (PSP) is hard to get right in the first attempt. There has never been a situation when I haven’t banged my head to get it working on the cluster. It is a frustrating experience, but it is one of the essential security features of Kubernetes. Some applications have started shipping the PSP configs with their helm charts, but if a helm chart does not ship a PSP config, it must be handcrafted by the cluster-admin to make the application work reliably in the cluster. ...

I use Fedora Linux as my primary desktop OS. Every time there is a fresh install, I find myself confounded on how to partition the OS. So I thought I might as well make a permanent note of how I do it so that I always have a place to come back to. Partitioning Scheme This is how I partition my Fedora during installation: Partition Mounted On Size Encrypted Filesystem Boot /boot 512M No ext4 Boot EFI /boot/efi 200M No vfat Swap - 1.5 times the RAM Yes swap Home /home 265G Yes ext4 Root / 211G No ext4 Encryption Note that Swap and Home partitions have to be encrypted. Swap extends the RAM and can have a sensitive copy of RAM data like passwords, keys, etc. Hence always ensure to encrypt the Swap partition. Home partition is equally essential to be encrypted because this is where your data will live. Things like configuration, SSH keys, GPG keys, API keys are all stored in the home in various directories. So it is of utmost importance that you encrypt these two directories. ...