When we talk about Kubernetes, we should really be talking about the fact that when you, as an administrator, interact with Kubernetes using kubectl, you are using kubectl to manipulate the state of data within Kubernetes via Kubernetes’s API.

But when you use kubectl, the way you tend to tell kubectl what to do with the Kubernetes API is using YAML. A lot of freakin’ YAML. So while I hope to write more about the actual Kubernetes API sometime soon, first we’ll have talk a bit about YAML; just enough to get going. Being frank, I don’t get on well with YAML. I do get on with JSON, because in JSON there is a single way to write anything. While you don’t even get to choose between double and single quotes for your strings in JSON, I overheard a colleague say that there are over sixty ways to write a string in YAML. Sixty ways to write a string! I think they were being serious.

I’ve been using a pair of AirPods Pro for just under a week now. I use headphones in three main environments, and up until now have used three separate pairs, each of which works best for that environment. As they combine true-wireless comfort, noise-cancelling, a high promise transparency mode and closed-backs, I wondered whether the AirPods Pro could possibly replace at least a couple of my existing sets. Here we go.

Because you work with CouchDB indexes using JSON and Javascript, it’s tempting to imagine there is something JSON or Javascript-y about how you use them. In the end, there isn’t: they end up on disk as B+ Trees, like pretty much every other database. In order to create appropriate indexes for your queries, it’s important to understand how these work. We can use tables as an easy mental model for indexes, and this article shows how that works for CouchDB’s Mango feature (also called Cloudant Query).

Avoiding using docker build --build-arg to inject secrets or passowrds into Docker image builds is established wisdom within the Docker community. Here’s why.

TLDR: Using build args for secrets exposes the secret to users of your image via docker history.

Today I needed to take a HTTP request and extract the etag header; the etag was used as part of an MVCC implementation in a service I was using and I wanted to script an update to a resource. I was doing this in a Makefile so wanted to do this without firing up a scripting language.

It turns out this is the domain of tools like sed. sed stands for stream editor. It applies scripts to text streams which edit the content of the stream. When you watch someone using sed, the scripts look super-cryptic, but in fact they’re not too bad. Like a regular expression, they benefit from reading left to right; when viewed as a whole they are just a mess. In fact, half of a sed script is often a regular expression!