My personal site to share knowledge through self-discovery

News and tech I find interesting — shared from my homelab and beyond.

Berkeley County’s $4 Billion Data Center: Penzance Project Sparks Debate and Election Implications

LEGAL DISCLAIMER: This analysis is for educational and research purposes only and does not constitute legal advice. The information provided represents a collection of publicly available data, legal research, and potential avenues for further investigation. For specific legal questions or to pursue any of the strategies discussed, readers must consult with qualified attorneys licensed to practice law in West Virginia and familiar with administrative law, constitutional law, and federal preemption issues. Each legal situation is unique and requires professional legal counsel.

Why Youth Sports May Be Holding Your Child Back — And What Actually Helps

We spend years driving kids to practices, paying for uniforms and league fees, and handing them over to coaches we barely know — all in the belief that team sports build character. The research and the lived experience tell a more complicated story.

This Week in Cyber: Top CVEs and Hacks — Week of March 16, 2026

Chrome zero-days actively exploited. Veeam backup servers hit with CVSS 9.9 flaws. An AI agent platform weaponized via prompt injection. Plus: INTERPOL dismantles 45,000 malicious servers in a global crackdown. Here’s everything that mattered in cybersecurity this week.

The Housing Market in 2026: What’s Really Going On and What Comes Next

Everyone has an opinion on the housing market. Perma-bears have been predicting a crash for years. Perma-bulls say prices only go up. The reality in 2026 is more interesting and more nuanced than either camp admits. Here’s an honest analysis of where the market is, why it got here, and what’s most likely to happen next.

The Hidden Cost of Connectivity: Are Smartphones Making Us Lonelier?

We have more tools for connection than at any point in human history — and we are experiencing a loneliness epidemic. The correlation isn’t a coincidence. The technology that promised to bring us together appears to be, for many people, doing the opposite. Here’s an honest look at the evidence and what you can actually do about it.

The Most Underrated National Parks You’ve Never Visited — and Why You Should Fix That

Yellowstone, Yosemite, and the Grand Canyon are extraordinary. They’re also so crowded in peak season that the experience is often miserable. But the National Park System contains 63 national parks and hundreds of monuments, recreation areas, and historic sites — many of them magnificent and genuinely uncrowded. Here are the parks that deserve your attention.

Why the Military Recruits from Small Towns — and What That Tells Us About America

Military recruiting data has shown for decades that rural and small-town America produces a disproportionate share of military enlistees. The reasons why reveal something important about values, economic opportunity, and the geographic divide in American civic culture that goes largely unexamined in coastal media.

10 Beginner Homesteading Skills You Can Learn This Weekend — and Why You Should

You don’t need 40 acres in Montana to start homesteading. The core skills — growing food, preserving it, making basic repairs, and reducing dependence on fragile supply chains — are learnable in days or weeks and applicable to homes of any size. Here are 10 foundational skills that will pay dividends for years, starting this weekend.

How America Lost the Manufacturing Habit — and Why Getting It Back Is Harder Than Anyone Is Admitting

The political class has rediscovered manufacturing as a priority. Tariffs, CHIPS Act funding, and infrastructure spending are all aimed at rebuilding American industrial capacity. But there’s a problem: rebuilding manufacturing isn’t just about money and policy. It’s about skills, culture, and an industrial ecosystem that took generations to build and three decades to hollow out. Here’s what actually happened — and what it will realistically take to reverse it.

Where to Find the Latest CVEs: Your Guide to Staying Ahead of Vulnerabilities

Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs) are the lifeblood of the cybersecurity community. Knowing where to find them — and how to prioritize them — is a critical skill for anyone in IT or security. Here’s a comprehensive guide to the best sources.

Electric Vehicles Are Winning Everywhere Except Where It Matters Most: The American Pickup Truck

The EV revolution has made extraordinary progress in sedans, SUVs, and luxury vehicles. But in America’s most popular vehicle category — the full-size pickup truck — electric is still struggling to convert the working truck buyer. Here’s an honest look at why, and what it will actually take to change that.

AI in the Classroom: Are We Creating a Generation That Can’t Think?

ChatGPT and its successors have fundamentally disrupted education — and most schools are still figuring out how to respond. But beneath the debate about cheating and academic integrity lies a deeper question: if AI does the writing, the research, and increasingly the thinking for students, what cognitive muscles are we failing to develop? The answer matters more than most educators are admitting.

Why Your Grocery Bill Is Never Going Back Down: The Permanent Inflation Story

Food prices spiked during the pandemic and inflation era — and the economy was supposed to return to normal. It hasn’t. Grocery bills that doubled or grew by 40% in five years have not come back down, and there are structural reasons why they never will. Here’s the honest explanation for why food costs have permanently reset upward.

Why Everybody Is Tired: The Science Behind the Modern Exhaustion Epidemic

Chronic fatigue has become so normalized in modern life that we’ve stopped treating it as a problem. But the exhaustion epidemic is real, measurable, and deeply connected to how we’ve structured work, technology, and rest in the 21st century. Here’s what the science actually says — and what you can do about it.

The Great Wealth Transfer: Boomers, Millennials, and the Biggest Financial Shift in History

Over the next two decades, an estimated $84 trillion will change hands from the Baby Boom generation to their children and grandchildren. It is the largest intergenerational wealth transfer in human history — and it will reshape everything from housing markets to political priorities. Here’s what’s actually happening and what it means for you.

Berkeley County, WV: The Apple Industry and Agricultural Heritage

Long before Berkeley County became known for its distribution centers, MARC train commuters, or its role in Civil War history, it was known for something more fundamental: its extraordinary agricultural fertility. The limestone-underlain soils of the northern Shenandoah Valley are among the most productive in Appalachia, and Berkeley County’s farmers exploited that natural advantage for two centuries to create one of the region’s most prosperous agricultural economies.

Berkeley County, WV: Before the Settlers — Native American History and the First Peoples

When historians and local boosters narrate the history of Berkeley County, the story typically begins with the arrival of European settlers in the early 1700s. But the land they found was not empty. It was a landscape shaped by millennia of human habitation, trade, conflict, and cultivation — a place whose Indigenous history stretches back at least 12,000 years and perhaps much longer.

Berkeley County, WV: Crime, Controversy, and Community Resilience

Berkeley County, West Virginia is in many ways a success story — a growing, prosperous community in a state that has struggled with economic decline. But like every community, it has a shadow side, a history of crime, violence, and social dysfunction that deserves honest examination. From the frontier justice of the 18th century to the drug epidemic of the 21st, crime has shaped Berkeley County’s story in ways that must be acknowledged.

Berkeley County, WV: The Best Pizza in the Eastern Panhandle — A Ratings Analysis

A county growing as fast as Berkeley has developed a robust dining scene to match its expanding population. Among the food categories most passionately debated by residents, pizza occupies a special place. The combination of Berkeley County’s working-class roots, its large population of transplants from pizza-rich metro areas like Washington and Baltimore, and the simple universal appeal of a good pie has made pizza a surprisingly competitive category here. Let’s take a serious look at what the county has to offer.

Berkeley County, WV: The New American Commuter Town

If you drive through Berkeley County on a weekday morning, you’ll notice something: a steady stream of cars heading east on US-9 and US-11 toward the MARC train station in Martinsburg, or north on I-81 toward the Maryland state line. These are the commuters — the teachers, federal employees, contractors, nurses, and office workers who have chosen to live in Berkeley County while working in Washington, D.C., suburban Maryland, or Northern Virginia. Their presence is reshaping Berkeley County in ways both exciting and contentious.

Berkeley County, WV: Famous Landscapes and Natural Wonders

Berkeley County is not a place that announces its beauty loudly. It doesn’t have the soaring peaks of the Allegheny Highlands or the dramatic gorges of the New River. But its landscapes have a particular grace — a softness of rolling hills and creek bottoms, punctuated by limestone outcroppings and framed by the distant blue ridges that give the mountains their name. For those who take the time to look, the Eastern Panhandle offers some of the most rewarding scenery in West Virginia.

Berkeley County, WV: Faith, Community, and the Religious Landscape

Religion has been woven into the life of Berkeley County, West Virginia since its founding. The first permanent European settlers who pushed into the Shenandoah Valley in the early 18th century brought their faiths with them — Presbyterian Scots-Irish from Pennsylvania, Anglican English planters from the Tidewater, German Reformed and Lutheran farmers from the Rhine Valley. The diversity of that founding religious landscape has persisted and deepened across three centuries.

Berkeley County, WV: The Evolution of Education in the Eastern Panhandle

The story of education in Berkeley County is inseparable from the story of the county itself. As Berkeley County has grown and changed — from frontier settlement to railroad hub to modern exurban community — its schools have mirrored those transformations, for better and for worse.

Berkeley County, WV: The Industrial Backbone of the Eastern Panhandle

Berkeley County’s economy has never been static. Since the earliest days of European settlement, its geographic position — at the northern gateway to the Shenandoah Valley, where road, river, and eventually rail converged — made it a hub of commerce and production. The county’s industrial evolution spans nearly three centuries, from frontier mills and iron furnaces to the massive distribution centers and healthcare campuses that define its economic landscape today.

Berkeley County, WV: A County Divided by Civil War

Few counties in the border states endured the Civil War’s chaos quite like Berkeley County, West Virginia. Perched at the confluence of geography and strategy — where the fertile Shenandoah Valley narrows toward the Potomac River, and where the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad threaded the mountains — Berkeley County became a perpetual battleground from 1861 to 1865. Its county seat, Martinsburg, changed hands no fewer than a dozen times during the war, earning it a grim reputation as one of the most contested towns in the Eastern Theater.

The Pillars of Creation: A Window Into the Universe’s Grandest Theater

There are few images in human history that stop you in your tracks quite like the Pillars of Creation. Majestic, ancient, and hauntingly alive — it looks less like a photograph of gas and dust and more like a painting of celestial beings at play.

AI Datacenter in Berkeley County, WV: The Promise They’re Selling and the Reality They’re Not

Tech companies promise jobs, tax revenue, and economic transformation when they pitch datacenters to rural communities. Berkeley County deserves an honest accounting of what they actually deliver — and why deserts, not suburbs, are where these facilities belong.

The Reasoning Model War: How AI Learned to Think — and What It Means for Developers

2026 is the year reasoning models went from research curiosity to production necessity. OpenAI’s o3, Anthropic’s Claude with extended thinking, Google’s Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking, and DeepSeek R1 have ignited an arms race in AI ‘thinking’ — and it’s reshaping how software gets built. Here’s what’s actually happening and why it matters.

10 Reasons Why Going to War With Iran Is a Bad Idea

As war drums beat louder over Iran, it’s worth stepping back and asking the hard question: what would actually happen? Drawing on historical precedent, military analysis, and documented evidence, here are 10 reasons why a war with Iran would be catastrophic — for the region, for the United States, and for the world.

How Little League Baseball Has Lost Its Way: Scandals, Bans, and a Broken System

Hedgesville Little League banned a parent for calling out daddy ball — then a FOIA request revealed they had no valid lease on school property. This is the story of Hedgesville Little League, Berkeley County Schools, and how Little League Baseball’s systemic failures play out at the local level.

The Danger of Labels: How Wartime Prejudice Repeats History

As conflict in Iran dominates headlines, a familiar and dangerous pattern is re-emerging: labeling entire religious groups as monolithic threats. We’ve been down this road before — and the destination was catastrophic. Understanding the history of how labels dehumanize and the hard-won reasons America enshrined freedom of religion matters more now than ever.

Call of Duty: The Best Way to Unwind

Taking a Break the Right Way

The RTO Wars Are Over. Here’s Who Actually Won.

After two years of Return-to-Office mandates, counter-mandates, quiet quitting, and talent reshuffling, the hybrid work debate has mostly settled — just not the way either side predicted. Here’s the honest state of where tech workers actually are in 2026.

SBOMs and Software Supply Chain Security: From Executive Order to Daily Practice

Executive Order 14028 mandated SBOMs for federal software. Now the practice is spreading throughout regulated industries. Here’s what a Software Bill of Materials actually is, why it matters, and how to generate, sign, and use SBOMs in a Kubernetes CI/CD pipeline.

Kubernetes Multi-Tenancy: The Hard Parts and How to Actually Do It

Multi-tenant Kubernetes is one of those topics where the gap between ‘we use namespaces’ and ‘we have real isolation’ is enormous. Here’s what proper Kubernetes multi-tenancy actually requires, and the tools that make it possible without managing hundreds of clusters.

Taiwan, TSMC, and the Semiconductor Risk Nobody Wants to Talk About

90% of the world’s most advanced semiconductors are made in Taiwan. If that supply were disrupted — by conflict, natural disaster, or blockade — the consequences for every technology-dependent industry would be severe. This is the risk that should be in every technology leader’s planning.

The AI Copyright War: What Developers and Creators Need to Know

The lawsuits over AI training data have been piling up since 2023. In 2025-2026, we’re getting actual court decisions. Here’s what the legal landscape looks like for developers using AI tools, companies training models, and creators whose work was scraped.

Getting Started with Cilium: The CNI That Does Everything

Cilium has become the default CNI choice for new Kubernetes deployments for good reason: it replaces iptables with eBPF, provides rich observability through Hubble, and implements NetworkPolicy better than any other option. Here’s how to get started.

Flux OCI Artifacts: The Next Evolution of GitOps

Flux OCI artifacts let you store and distribute Kubernetes configurations as container registry artifacts, not just Git repositories. This enables signed, versioned, auditable infrastructure deployments that work better in regulated and air-gapped environments.

Model Context Protocol: The Standard That’s Changing How AI Tools Connect to Everything

Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol (MCP) is emerging as the standard way to give AI models access to external systems — databases, APIs, file systems, and services. Here’s what it is, how it works, and why it matters for developers building AI integrations.

Vibe Coding: How AI Has Actually Changed How I Write Code

A year ago I was skeptical about AI coding tools beyond autocomplete. Now I can’t imagine working without them. Here’s an honest look at how AI has changed my daily coding workflow — what works, what doesn’t, and what it means for developers.

RKE2 Hardening Guide: CIS Benchmarks and DoD STIGs in a Homelab

RKE2 was designed with security in mind, but out-of-the-box it’s not fully CIS or STIG compliant. Here’s a practical hardening guide for RKE2 on Rocky Linux 9, covering the configuration changes that actually matter for security compliance.

AI-Native Applications: What Architecture Actually Changes When AI Is Core

Adding an AI feature is easy. Building an application where AI is the core — where the product only exists because of AI capabilities — requires rethinking your entire architecture. Here’s what changes and what patterns are emerging.

Tariffs, Chips, and the Tech Supply Chain: What the Trade War Means for Infrastructure

The 2025 tariff escalation hit tech hardware directly — server components, networking gear, and consumer electronics all got more expensive. Here’s how the trade war is reshaping infrastructure procurement and what it means for your homelab and business budgets.

DOGE and the Government IT Reckoning: What Happens When You Move Fast in Legacy Systems

The Department of Government Efficiency moved fast through federal IT systems in early 2025. The results were predictably chaotic. Here’s what an IT professional sees when looking at what happened — and what it reveals about the state of government technology.

OpenTelemetry Has Won: What That Means for Your Observability Stack

OpenTelemetry is now the de facto standard for observability instrumentation — every major observability vendor supports it, every language has an SDK, and Kubernetes has native integration. Here’s how to set up a production-grade observability stack built on OTel.

The EU AI Act Is Enforcing in 2025: What Developers Actually Need to Know

The EU AI Act started enforcement in February 2025, with full application rolling out through 2026. If you’re building AI systems for European users, this is now a legal requirement, not a planning item. Here’s what it requires and what it means for developers.

The Homelab Renaissance: Why Tinkerers Are Building Data Centers in Their Basements Again

Homelab culture never died, but it’s having a genuine moment in 2025-2026. AI inference costs, privacy concerns, cloud price increases, and the availability of cheap server hardware are all driving a wave of people building real infrastructure at home.

Running LLMs in Kubernetes: A Practical Guide for 2026

Open-weight models like DeepSeek, Llama, and Mistral have made self-hosted AI inference viable. Here’s how to actually deploy and operate LLM inference in Kubernetes — GPU scheduling, model serving, autoscaling, and monitoring.

Rust in the Linux Kernel: Where Things Stand in 2026

Rust was merged into the Linux kernel in 2022. Three years later, the experiment is real and accelerating — Apple, Google, and major Linux contributors are all writing kernel code in Rust. Here’s the current state and why it matters for systems security.

Karpenter: The Better Way to Autoscale Kubernetes Nodes

Karpenter replaces the Kubernetes Cluster Autoscaler with a faster, more intelligent approach to node provisioning. Instead of scaling fixed node groups, Karpenter provisions exactly the right node for each pending pod — and the cost savings are real.

Dagger: CI/CD Pipelines as Code That Actually Work Locally

Dagger solves one of the most persistent problems in CI/CD: pipelines that work in CI but fail locally, or that are so tangled in platform-specific YAML that they’re impossible to debug. Here’s how it works and why it’s worth evaluating.

Go 1.24: What’s New and Worth Using

Go 1.24 shipped in February 2025 with improvements to iterators, the toolchain, testing, and performance. None of it is revolutionary, but the iterator changes and tool dependency management are genuinely useful for day-to-day Go development.

WebAssembly Beyond the Browser: WASM for Edge Computing and Serverless

WebAssembly started in browsers but is quietly becoming the runtime of choice for edge computing and serverless workloads. It’s fast, secure, and portable — and tools like SpinKube are making it a first-class Kubernetes citizen.

eBPF: Beyond Networking — The Technology Quietly Reshaping Linux

eBPF started as a way to filter network packets. It’s now the foundation of the next generation of security, observability, and performance tooling on Linux. Here’s what it does, why it matters, and where it’s being used in production.

Kubernetes 1.32: What’s New and What Actually Matters

Kubernetes 1.32 shipped in December 2024 with over 60 enhancements. Most won’t affect your daily work, but a handful change how you should think about scheduling, security, and resource management. Here’s what to actually focus on.

AI Agents in DevOps: Hype, Reality, and Where It’s Actually Useful

AI agents promise to run your entire infrastructure autonomously. The reality is more nuanced — but there are specific DevOps workflows where AI agents are already genuinely useful, and knowing which is which saves you from expensive experiments.

DeepSeek R1: The AI Model That Rattled Silicon Valley and Wall Street

In January 2025, a Chinese AI lab released DeepSeek R1 for free, matching or beating GPT-4 at a fraction of the cost. Nvidia lost $600 billion in market cap in a single day. Here’s what actually happened and why it matters.

Theories About Space and Time: The Universe’s Most Unsettling Ideas

Space and time are not what they appear to be. From Einstein’s relativity to quantum entanglement to the multiverse, here are the ideas about space and time that should genuinely change how you think about reality.

How to Survive a Home Invasion: Preparation, Response, and Recovery

Home invasions are terrifying precisely because they violate the one place you expect to feel safe. But preparation, clear thinking, and a practiced plan dramatically improve your odds.

Getting Out of Your Head: How to Stop Overthinking Work and Start Taking Care of Your Body

Knowledge workers spend most of their lives in their heads. The meetings, the slack messages, the endless problem-solving — and when work stops, the rumination starts. Here’s how to break the cycle and actually take care of your body.

How a Loyal, Family Man Should Act: Integrity and Grit in the Real World

Being a loyal husband and father in the modern world requires more than good intentions. It requires a code, consistent behavior, and the willingness to be the kind of man your family deserves — especially when no one is watching.

Why Politics No Longer Matters: It’s a Lose-Lose Game

The political system has devolved into a team sport that generates more heat than light. Here’s why investing your energy and identity in it is a losing proposition — and what to do instead.

Getting Started in Go Development: Simple, Fast, and Built for the Real World

Go is the language behind Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform, and dozens of other critical infrastructure tools. It’s fast to learn, opinionated by design, and built for the kind of software that actually runs in production.

Getting Started in Rust Development: A Practical Guide

Rust is one of the most loved programming languages for good reason — memory safety without garbage collection, fearless concurrency, and blazing performance. Here’s how to actually get started.

Staying Motivated in IT: How to Keep the Fire Burning

IT is a field that can burn you out fast. The tech changes constantly, the on-call rotations grind you down, and imposter syndrome never fully goes away. Here’s how to stay motivated for the long haul.

SpaceX and Mars by 2030: Ambition, Reality, and the Odds

Elon Musk has repeatedly said SpaceX will land humans on Mars by 2030. Is this ambition or fantasy? Here’s a grounded look at the engineering, the timelines, and the real odds.

The BRICS Threat to USD Dominance: What It Means for Your Wallet

The BRICS coalition is challenging the US dollar’s reserve currency status. Here’s what that means, how real the threat actually is, and why you should care.

Zero Trust Is a Fad. Traditional VPN Is Still Required.

Zero Trust has become the security industry’s favorite buzzword. Everyone’s selling it, most organizations are just rebranding their existing perimeter controls, and traditional VPN is quietly holding everything together while the marketing team pats itself on the back.

Zarf: The Missing Link for Air-Gapped Kubernetes Deployments

Deploying to an air-gapped network is a special kind of pain. Zarf takes that pain away—packaging everything you need to deploy Kubernetes applications into a single, transportable bundle.

Platform One Big Bang: Too Much, Too Soon, and Why It’s Hurting Kubernetes Engineers

Platform One Big Bang solves a real problem for large DoD programs—but it also hands engineers a fully assembled black box and calls it a Kubernetes education. That’s a problem worth talking about.

The Real Cost of Kubernetes: What Nobody Tells You Before You Start

Kubernetes is powerful and has a real place in modern infrastructure. It also has real costs that are consistently undersold. Here’s an honest accounting of what you’re signing up for before you run that first helm install.

The Best Way to Test Java Applications in 2026

Java testing has evolved significantly. The combination of JUnit 5, Mockito, Testcontainers, and ArchUnit gives you a testing strategy that catches real bugs—not just the ones that were convenient to test.

The Social Media Reckoning: Why the Decline Was Inevitable and What Comes Next

The Slowdown Is Real

The Social Media Slowdown: What Caused It, Why Quitting Is Better, and How Society Moves Forward

The platforms that promised to connect humanity have spent two decades doing the opposite. User growth is stalling, trust is evaporating, and a growing movement is walking away entirely. Here’s what caused the social media slowdown, why leaving is genuinely better for you, and how we rebuild human connection on our own terms.

Salt Typhoon, Volt Typhoon, and the Silent War: China’s Escalating Cyberattacks on U.S. Infrastructure

For years, Chinese state-sponsored hackers operated in the shadows of U.S. networks. Then Salt Typhoon exposed just how deep they had gotten. Inside the most significant cyber espionage campaign to hit American infrastructure in recent history — and what it means for national security.

Talos Linux: The Operating System Kubernetes Was Always Waiting For

Talos Linux is not a regular Linux distribution. It has no SSH, no shell, no package manager, and no way to log in. It is managed entirely through an API, and it might be the most secure way to run Kubernetes that exists.

The Death and Rebirth of Remote Work: How AI and Global Competition Are Reshaping Tech Jobs in 2026

The return-to-office mandates were supposed to kill remote work. Instead, they’ve created the most dramatic reshuffling of tech talent in a generation. Companies mandating office presence are losing their best people to competitors embracing AI-powered remote collaboration. Here’s what’s really happening in 2026.

The AI Coding Revolution: Why Junior Developers Are Disappearing and What It Means for 2026

The numbers don’t lie: AI coding assistants are boosting senior developer productivity by 35% while junior hiring at Big Tech has dropped 25%. We’re witnessing the most dramatic shift in software development since the internet. But what does this mean for the future of coding careers?

America Is Giving Up on Open Source. The World Is Filling the Void. But at What Cost?

Something is fundamentally broken in the American open-source ecosystem. As U.S. companies systematically abandon their open-source commitments, international alternatives are emerging - but are we trading one set of risks for another?

SOPS: The Elegantly Simple Way to Store Secrets in Git

SOPS (Secrets OPerationS) lets you commit encrypted secrets directly to your Git repository. It’s simple, it’s auditable, and it works beautifully with GitOps workflows. Here’s how to use it properly.

Service Mesh: When You Need It, When You Don’t, and Istio vs. Linkerd

Service meshes solve real problems—mTLS between services, traffic management, observability—but they add significant complexity. Here’s how to decide if you need one, and which one to choose.

Progressive Delivery: Beyond Blue-Green and Canary Deployments

Blue-green and canary deployments are well understood. Progressive delivery goes further—automatic metric analysis, gradual traffic shifting, and rollback that doesn’t require human intervention. Here’s how to implement it properly.

Platform Engineering: Building the Internal Developer Platform Your Teams Actually Want

Platform engineering is the discipline of treating internal developer tooling as a product. Done right, it multiplies engineering velocity. Done wrong, it’s a second bureaucracy that developers work around.

I’m Losing Interest in IT, and I Think AI Is Why

For the first time in my career, I find myself less excited about technology than I used to be. Not because the problems got easier—but because AI took away the part I actually enjoyed.

Kubernetes RBAC: Implementing Least Privilege Without Losing Your Mind

Kubernetes RBAC is powerful and, at scale, genuinely complex. Getting it right means building a least-privilege model where every service account, user, and system component has exactly the permissions it needs—nothing more.

Kubernetes Persistent Storage: PVCs, Storage Classes, and Operators That Actually Work

Persistent storage in Kubernetes is where stateless architecture philosophy meets the reality that databases exist. Here’s how Kubernetes storage actually works, and which solutions hold up in production.

Kubernetes Observability: Metrics, Logs, and Traces Done Right

Running Kubernetes without observability is flying blind. Here’s the modern observability stack—metrics, logs, and traces—and how to implement it without building a second job for yourself.

Kubernetes Networking: From Container to Cloud (Without Losing Your Mind)

Kubernetes networking is notoriously difficult to understand. Pods, Services, Ingresses, NetworkPolicies, CNIs—it’s a lot. Here’s a systematic breakdown of how traffic actually flows in a Kubernetes cluster.

Kubernetes CIS Benchmarks: A Practical Hardening Guide

The CIS Kubernetes Benchmark isn’t just a compliance checkbox—it’s a practical hardening guide based on real attack patterns. Here’s how to actually implement it, not just scan for it.

Infrastructure as Code: Terraform vs. Pulumi and When Each Makes Sense

Terraform is the incumbent IaC tool and remains excellent. Pulumi is the challenger that lets you write infrastructure in real programming languages. Here’s when to use each—and when the choice matters less than the discipline.

Building a Production-Grade Homelab Kubernetes Cluster in 2026

Running Kubernetes at home used to mean janky single-node clusters or expensive server hardware. In 2026, the tooling has matured to the point where a genuine production-grade homelab cluster is accessible—here’s the complete stack.

Helm Best Practices: Writing Charts That Don’t Become Technical Debt

Helm charts start simple and become unmaintainable faster than almost any other Kubernetes artifact. Here’s how to write charts that age well.

GitOps vs. Traditional Operations: What You Actually Gain (and Lose)

GitOps is not just ‘deploy from Git.’ It’s a fundamentally different relationship between your team and your infrastructure. Here’s an honest comparison with what came before.

Flux GitOps: Reconciliation Loops and Why They Change Everything

Flux isn’t just another deployment tool. Its reconciliation model is a fundamentally different way to think about infrastructure state—and once you get it, you can’t go back.

DevSecOps: Making Security an Engineering Problem, Not a Gate

Security as a gate at the end of development is a broken model. DevSecOps means integrating security into every phase of the SDLC—not because compliance requires it, but because finding vulnerabilities at commit time is infinitely cheaper than finding them in production.

Container Security: Hardening Your Images and Runtime

Container security is a multi-layer problem: build-time security in your Dockerfile, image scanning in your registry, and runtime security in your cluster. Skipping any layer leaves you exposed.

CI/CD Pipelines: Best Practices for Modern Software Delivery

CI/CD pipelines are the backbone of modern software delivery, but most teams are doing them wrong. Here’s what actually matters.

The Best Way to Deploy Kubernetes Applications in 2026

There are a dozen ways to deploy apps to Kubernetes. Most of them are wrong. Here’s what the modern deployment workflow actually looks like and why.

Argo CD vs Flux: Choosing the Right GitOps Tool for Your Team

The GitOps tooling debate is real. Argo CD and Flux are both excellent, but they’re built on different philosophies. Here’s how to actually choose between them.

Suno AI Review

Description

Review of Suno AI.

Suno AI was brought up by my brother, so I gave it a try, and it is pretty good.

Mirantis Lens Desktop Review

Description

Review of Mirantis Lens Desktop.

Stack Overflow

Why Did I Leave Stack Overflow?

Jekyll Continuous Deployment using Jenkins

Description

Set up an automated deployment of your Jekyll website via Jenkins.

JIRA Installation with Reverse Proxy

Description

Set up Atlassian Jira on Microsoft SQL Server 2017 with Apache Web Server.

VMWare ESXi 6.5 ghettoVCB Automatic Backups

Description

These instructions will enable you to backup your ESXi, including free ESXi, VMs using GhettoVCB and a cron job.

VMWare ESXi 6.5 iso for RealTek NIC

Description

These instructions will enable you to set up VMWare ESXi on your old DELL XPS Desktop using the onboard Realtek NIC card. Without customizing the iso, the ESXi installation will fail unless you have a secondary NIC that is supported. VMWare does not support Realtek NIC cards, so don’t expect support from VMWare if you use these instructions.

Host Jekyll Website on AWS

Description

Hosting Jekyll on AWS S3 should cost me between $1-5/month based on my research. This is cheaper than hosting a website on Godaddy.com. Additionally, an added benefit is that the entire content of my website can exist within a git repository. There is no database to manage. The downside is that you should use Route53 and Cloudfront in addition to just S3 for stability and to increase performance. This becomes expensive, outside of the free Tier, because Amazon charges for every single little thing. You’ll be watching the billing dashboard like a hawk, rather than focusing on the content of your website. Also, using GoDaddy DNS with Amazon S3 only allows for http, so this is purely temporary for me. I will go back to GoDaddy or hosting my website locally on a Raspberry PI 3. The following is a simplified flowchart of how the navigation works using GoDaddy DNS to point to my AWS bucket:

Marvel API Background on UWP Application

Description

A C# Model, Mainpage.xaml.cs, and a Mainpage.xaml view in a Universal Windows Platform (UWP) application are used to showcase a random Marvel Character from the Marvel API. The first image appears (starting at 20 seconds) and it continues to display a random character every 20 seconds. Very simple, but fun.