Devops

Beyond “Works on My Machine”: A Practical Journey into Reproducible Dev / DevOps Environments

by

This post is my reflection on rebuilding my development environment around reproducibility after taking the “Dev Containers, Neovim & Config Management” course from KubeCraft. Instead of yet another fragile laptop setup, I now treat the dev environment like real infrastructure: defined in devcontainer.json, recreated via Dev Containers and DevPod, and verified instead of assumed. That mindset directly tackles the “works on my machine” problem, especially in Kubernetes work where teams need consistent kubectl, helm, and cloud CLI versions across all engineers.

I also describe how I started managing my dotfiles as personal infrastructure using Chezmoi and how Mise gives me a structured way to pin tool versions per project without polluting the whole system. Together, these tools form a pipeline where containers start, dotfiles apply, trusted tools install, and I land in a predictable environment—whether on my laptop, in an ephemeral workspace, or on a remote admin node.

With roughly three decades of Linux and infrastructure experience, my goal here is not to show off a fancy shell, but to move from artisanal one-off setups toward explicit, reproducible engineering systems that a whole DevOps/Kubernetes team can rely on.

Learning Modern Networking: From IP Basics To Spine‑Leaf Fabrics With containerlab

by

I just finished a deeply hands-on networking course that took me from basic IP fundamentals all the way to building a BGP‑driven spine‑leaf fabric with containerlab and Nokia SR Linux. What started as “let’s recall how IP and routing work” ended with me automating data‑center‑style topologies and understanding why this architecture is the de‑facto standard … Read more

Leveling up my Kubernetes fundamentals in the homelab

by

Over the last weekend I worked through a hands‑on Kubernetes fundamentals module and rebuilt everything in my own homelab, from simple pods all the way to Helm‑based monitoring with the kube‑prometheus‑stack. The goal was not just to “get it running”, but to really understand how the core building blocks of a Kubernetes platform fit together … Read more

From Hybrid Playground to Headless Homelab Server – Cleaning up a Proxmox Install on Debian

by

Proxmox VE, built on Debian, may suffer from package bloat when used with desktop environments and productivity tools. To revert to a pure Proxmox hypervisor, users should back up configurations, purge unnecessary applications like LibreOffice and KDE, clean up configuration remnants, and autoremove orphaned dependencies, ensuring Proxmox remains intact.