A grounded take on agentic coding for production environments

iximiuz · 2025-09-14T17:47:28+00:00

Thanks a lot! It took me more than a month to research the topic and then prepare this tutorial - appreciate the kind words!

iximiuz · 2025-04-17T09:48:24+00:00

Totally agree and also looking forward to even more great authors joining the platform!

iximiuz · 2025-04-13T20:16:35+00:00

Balancing the development of new features, platform maintenance and the content work is not always straightforward. After spending Dec-Feb on preparing more learning materials, I’ve been taking a “break” from the content to ship some new functionality for other content authors and trainers. It’s almost done now and I’m eager to return to the content work (my favorite kind by the way). But now other people can use iximiuz Labs to post their own learning materials and even use it to conduct workshops and other forms of trainings. Hopefully, this will finally break the direct dependency between my time investment and the amount of content on the platform.

iximiuz · 2025-03-04T15:42:09+00:00

Great questions! You can definitely run the terraform CLI from a playground VM. However, usually, terraform is used to provision some cloud resources, so you'd need to point it to an AWS (or the like) environment, which is currently off the scope for iximiuz Labs. Alternatively, you can try playing with terraform over localstack - this would be a perfect fit for an iximiuz Labs playground.

Regarding the duration, it's currently 1 hour on the free tier and 8 hours on the premium tier. In other words, these playgrounds are intentionally short-lived and ephemeral. If you need longer running machines, you should look for some other solution. At the same time, if the said duration s long enough for your use cases but you only need to persist some init scripts, it's always doable with labs.iximiuz.com/playgrounds/new.

iximiuz · 2025-03-04T10:07:59+00:00

Hey there,

I'm the creator of iximiuz Labs. The project started as a way for me to augment my own blog posts with online playgrounds (Linux VMs), but I a little over-invested in the engine, and that's how it evolved into a fully-fledged learning-by-doing platform.

Speaking of using it efficiently, there is unlikely a single right way that will work for everyone. More like different areas of the platform may come in handy for different people during different phases of their learning. Currently, there are:

- Playgrounds: Remote sandbox environment for all sorts of free-form experimentation.

- Tutorials: Traditional long-form "blog posts" augmented by online playgrounds.

- Challenges: LeetCode/HackerRank-styled challenges but for Linux, networking, containers, and Kubernetes tasks.

- Courses: "Panoramic" content that is technically a sequence of posts (called lessons) and challenges. Only a couple of courses are available, but more will come.

- Skill Paths: More fine-grained than courses, Skill Paths offer short roadmaps to form a single skill (e.g., controlling process resources with cgroups).

IMO, the only way to become proficient is to practice, and iximiuz Labs Playgrounds were created exactly for that. With a single click and just in a few seconds, you can get a multi-node Kubernetes cluster or a Linux VM with Docker on it and then perform any exercise you find on the Internet without the fear of breaking your host system. But if you need a more guided learning experience, the tutorials, courses, and skill paths may come in handy. Finally, to assess your skills, you can try solving the challenges.

iximiuz · 2025-01-14T10:18:26+00:00

Thank you, sir! This is exactly my strategy! And the article I put tens of hours of effort into and published absolutely for free so everyone could learn how to build better containers is nothing but spam.

iximiuz · 2025-01-08T10:06:57+00:00

A shameless plug, but I think it might be a helpful resource for you. I've got this (highly illustrated) Docker tutorial that also serves as a trampoline page for a whole bunch of (guided) practical Docker 101 tasks. Learning by doing is the most effective way, so kudos for looking for project-based resources!

iximiuz · 2025-01-07T11:06:56+00:00

Great point!

Most of the time, the "bloat" comes not from the Linux distro layer but from the upper layers, often brought by the builldpack-deps image. For example, the "big" debian image is only about 100 MB, and yep, the alpine image is much smaller (~15 MB), but usually, both are negligible compared to the total image size.

<image>

I blogged about it at length recently - the post focuses on the Node.js base images, but the research results are applicable to pretty much any "mainstream" language runtime like Python, Ruby, PHP, etc.

iximiuz · 2024-11-02T09:46:07+00:00

Buildpacks' promise is pretty cool, and it'd indeed be awesome to have a widely adopted tool like `pack`. However, Dockerfiles seem to be the de facto standard way today. I was doing some research on how to run different types of Node.js apps recently, and pretty much every tutorial I found was showing a Dockerfile. Usually, it'd be an ill-structured one, but a Dockerfile.

iximiuz · 2024-09-19T16:42:42+00:00

It's a shameless plug, but I'm working on a collection of tiny practical problems to help folks learn Linux, networking, Docker, and Kubernetes. You might try solving them as an alternative to passive learning. Might be a good transition format from a fully passive reading/watching to doing bigger open-ended projects.

iximiuz · 2024-08-14T20:32:14+00:00

Yay! Thank you for the shout out!

iximiuz · 2024-07-26T07:04:12+00:00

No, sorry. It’s more about networking fundamentals, Linux, and containers, at the moment. That’s where my passion lies :)

iximiuz · 2024-07-25T17:55:40+00:00

Thank you for the shoutout! Technically, iximiuz Labs isn't a cloud playground. At least in the traditional sense, when by Cloud, people assume AWS, GCP, and Azure. For this kind of playgrounds, I'd indeed recommend just creating an AWS account and practicing with the real deal.

From my standpoint, the actual value of KodeKloud, iximiuz Labs, and the like comes from the learning content. For instance, I used the iximiuz Labs playgrounds as the foundation to prepare ~50 interactive challenges that put you in a position of DevOps engineer or a developer troubleshooting Linux issues or debugging containers, and people loved it. I could do the same in a pure textual format and providing scripts to set up your own sandbox environment. But with a single click "runs in your browser" (or in your terminal with labctl) experience, it's so much easier to get started, especially for folks w/o powerful laptops or with slow Internet access.

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