Fabricio Jiménez Morales

Platform Engineer · Physics PhD

In the last few months, I’ve been working extensively on my transition to Platform Engineering, and that includes my online profile. The very fact that you’re reading this means, I may modestly say, that it’s working! Today, a short write-up about a nice improvement to my GitHub Profile: automatically listing my latest blog posts. Since I use the Hugo Papermod theme, I had to make sure the site was producing an RSS feed. This is achieved by ensuring that hugo.yaml has RSS as an element of outputs.home. Additionally, I added the RSS icon to my header by adding the following element to params.socialIcons: ...

I am a lucky guy. I have a great family. I was brought up in what was still a moderately functional country: Venezuela. I received a good education and attended the best school I could back home. Then I left, did my studies and research in several countries, and eventually established myself in France. My departure coincided with the a major escalation of many problems that would lead to the worst years in the country’s history. I believe that most of those problems have their origin in the bad faith of some individuals, but we have also had our fair share of bad luck. This post is not about politics, though. ...

I keep a commonplace book on my GitHub. Commonplace books have existed since antiquity and persisted through modern times. They are simply personal notebooks where the author collects anything interesting or potentially useful. These notebooks serve the purpose of capturing a thought or an observation for future reference. I believe that, at their core, every learning or knowledge-production system implements some version of a commonplace book. Wikipedia says: They can variously contain notes, proverbs, adages, aphorisms, maxims, recipes, quotes, letters, poems, tables of weights and measures, prayers, legal formulas, and other professional references." ...

You docker run. You get containers with networking. It’s that simple. But is it? Under the hood, Docker creates network namespaces, virtual Ethernet devices, bridges, routing rules and everything else needed for containers to communicate. I’m following Drew Elliot’s Networking Course lessons; the first of which is mostly about how networking happens in containers. What follows is based on the notes I made during the course and revised on my own, including some concepts I wanted to revise. ...

Recently, I’ve learned about development in dev containers. This idea is great because it allows for siloed, reproducible, full-featured environments for development. Since DevOps is about enabling product work, dev containers are a great example of that. This idea can actually go further: dev containers can also be used for management, admin, and DevOps tasks, like Kubernetes cluster management. In that case, tools and configuration files are as important as application code. One can have a dedicated management environment for a single cluster, reducing the risk of accidentally targeting the wrong cluster. ...

Security is one (if not the) main priority of many Linux administrators, and now more than ever this is the case in the context of the large number of systems we typically manage today: containerized systems running in clusters, cloud microservices, ephemeral environments, and so on. We talk a lot about the essentials: good password, key and secrets management, firewall policies, encryption, and similar topics; which is obviously critical. But I also believe that threats can be mitigated through small habits, in the commands we do daily. ...

About a half a life ago, I had my first Linux lesson, and the best so far. I was a freshman at uni and started learning Linux at Laboratorio Docente de Computación. After a few weeks there, the first important homework was a seemingly simple one: create a new user (your user) in a Linux machine using the terminal. But there’s a catch (see what I’m doing here?): no adduser or useradd scripts allowed. I could bring my notes but not my laptop. ...