Welcome to another edition of Caffeinated Coder! Today we're going to be taking a quick look at my set up to maintain the state of my k3s cluster in my home lab. This guide unlocks the simplicity of setting up and scaling your K3s nodes in a home lab environment using GitLab CI/CD. Imagine a YAML-driven pipeline that …

I'm back from a bit of a hectic time in my life! My wife and I had a new baby girl, and parents who've gone through the newborn phase know, that there's precious little time to be hacking away at your computer outside work when you have a little one crying upstairs. But now that she's kind of sleep trained, I'm back …

I've been workshopping an idea for another blog that I'd like to work on for the personal side of my life and my journey through Fatherhood. For this blog, I wanted to try out some new things, both on the blogging framework I use, as well as how I host and maintain the backing infrastructure. This short blog post will …

For a while now, I've been wanting a better set up on my home lab K3s cluster for exposing pods outside of the cluster itself for accesibility within my home network. After polling the community on this matter, I found that MetalLB is the recommended tool to use for this. So this post will go over my experience setting …

Recently, I've been thinking about improving the SEO for this blog and I came across the Bing URL submission API. This API allows website owners to submit new pages of their app for instant indexing by Bing. In this post, we'll go over how to automate this process with GitLab CI. So, how this new CI stage will work is …

In my previous post, I described a Helmfile deployment for observability around website monitoring. Now, as your monitoring needs grow, that Helmfile deployment will undergo more and more changes. To properly handle this at a larger scale, CI/CD is a must. In this post, we'll take a quick run through of a basic CI/CD …

If there's one thing I've learned during my time in the software industry, its that monitoring your software is important. If you want your website to be taken seriously, you don't want it to all of a sudden be down without you knowing for hours, or even days. This is where the topics of monitoring, alerting and …

As software engineers, no matter what part of the stack we work on, we're almost certainly going to be working with Docker in some way shape or form. Maybe you're a backend engineer who's writing ETL micro services deployed to Kubernetes, or maybe you're a front end engineer who wants a consistent way to test their …

Happy New Year's Eve everyone! Well, the blog's been live for a few weeks now, and I've left you lovely folks hanging with a single post about how the blog is hosted. Well, what better way to ring in the new year than writing about one of my favorite infrastructure as code languages, Helm. As every good DevOps engineer …

Well, as part of a coding blog written by a DevOps engineer, I should probably talk about some DevOps topics. Let's start with how the heck this site is currently hosted! So, at the time of writing, this site isn't actually live anywhere. Its also worth noting, I'm not expecting to break the internet with this blog, so …