Vendor support shapes how we learn IaC

19 Nov 2025 🔖 devops 💬 EN

Hot take / shower thought:  for any given IT resource configurator/administrator, the ease of grasping the point of idempotently declarative approaches to managing the current state of the resource’s configuration is largely dependent upon their good/bad luck with vendor support.  Vendors set the tone for learning journeys.

Licensing E2E Testing Frameworks

18 Nov 2025 🔖 web development 💬 EN

If you’re in an enterprise setting, you might need to ask for permission, not forgiveness, when it comes to importing third-party programming language libraries and software development kits (SDKs) into your codebases.

Choosing Terraform vs. Ansible

12 Nov 2025 🔖 devops 💬 EN

In my Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tool types article, I listed Terraform as a “resource provisioning (day 0)” tool example, and Ansible as a “configuration management (day 1)” tool example.

I don’t hate it … but it hasn’t stopped people from asking me to clarify the difference when…

Honestly, yeah, there’s a lot of overlap.

Azure Blob Storage SAS reasoning via PowerShell Pester

12 Nov 2025 🔖 azure powershell integration intermediate security tips web development 💬 EN

It turns out that once you’ve got PowerShell’s “Pester” module up and running on your computer, you don’t actually need to call Invoke-Pester to run code that includes syntax like Describe and It and | Should -Be. You can just run a normal .ps1 file and those commands simply … work … as if you’d run Invoke-Pester.

Censoring secrets from logs in infrastructure as code

15 Oct 2025 🔖 devops security 💬 EN

This is not exhaustive, but here’re a few coding hygiene tidbits for making sure that when you need to use a secret in your infrastructure as code (IaC), it doesn’t leak into its execution runtime’s system logs.

Test-driven development for infrastructure as code

15 Oct 2025 🔖 devops 💬 EN

Much as I’m hooked on it, I’ll admit test-driven development (TDD) has a reputation for being a bit intimidating to adopt in traditional software application development.

Luckily, it’s not just easier, but arguably almost tailor-made for the work of sysadmins taking on the challenge of infrastructure as code (IaC).

Infrastructure as code tool types

06 Oct 2025 🔖 devops 💬 EN

Lately, I’ve been studying industry-standard taxonomies for categorizing the many types of tool that a company needs if its wants to modernize delivering and managing servers using “infrastructure as code.”

So far, I’m at 15 categories.

Note: my examples are probably pretty inaccurate. I’m not a sysadmin, I’ve just been researching with GenAI and picking sysadmins’ brains, and potentially not very effectively. Please take this post with a grain of salt.

Notes from Designing Content Authoring Experiences

03 Oct 2025 🔖 web development 💬 EN

I work in tech. That means that for friends and family, I sometimes find myself fixing printers and making business web sites. Greg Dunlap’s new book “Designing Content Authoring Experiences” is a resource I wish I’d had available to me over the last two decades.

Look, ma, I'm a language teacher!

08 Aug 2025 🔖 professional development prompt engineering 💬 EN

I shared yesterday’s LLM prompts for requirements analysis and project scoping post with a friend, and they said:

“You got to teach languages this week!”

I teared up, and nearly dropped what I was holding, when I read that comment.

LLM-assisted requirements analysis and scoping

07 Aug 2025 🔖 devops prompt engineering 💬 EN

• Q: How do you eat an elephant?
• A: One bite at a time.
• Q: How do you pick the first bite?
• A: Like this (keep reading).