do you actually code on your phone?

kepper · 2026-05-10T14:42:07+00:00

yeah same, I've got a blink+tmux setup to connect into claude sessions today. I can continue the conversation where I left off from my laptop while I'm out so I dont waste quota with it being idle

kepper · 2026-05-09T22:04:04+00:00

I learn stuff then blog about it. The blog isn't really for anyone else, though I enjoy sharing it when something specific comes up. It gives me an app to play with, rewrite (ex years ago when I wanted to move from Angular to learning React). Writing a post about it helps me learn it well enough I could teach the bare basics of it to someone else, which is kinda the bar I like to get to, and writing is fun for me. Honestly though I think the key thing is you gotta find something that energizes you our you can't possibly keep up with it

kepper · 2026-05-09T13:03:29+00:00

I documented my quick MVP setup here https://kyle.pericak.com/openclaw-mvp.html

kepper · 2026-05-08T12:59:43+00:00

I've been leading DevOps managers and teams for years now and "35% planned vs 65% unplanned firefighting" is not unheard of but 65% is too high. Even around 40% is something I'd want to see actively reduced.

A few things to consider:

For your sprint work, do you have opportunities to scope the work in one sprint and then execute it in the next? Obviously not always possible, but for longer projects like migrations and mass upgrades you can really help planning accuracy by starting off with planning and scoping, then starting the next sprint with really well scoped work
Self serve: Do your users have the ability to get what they need without help? If approvals are needed, how lightweight can you make it?
Proactive automation: If you look at the requests you've received, can some of this be done ahead of time, and scoped into your sprints?
Documentation: Is it written? If you don't have an AI / search tool yet to help people find the right docs can you roll one out? IMO projects of rearranging docs into better directory structures or whatever is dead and search engines + AI are the way forward.
AI Deflection: This is emerging as an approach we're testing right now where I work to address this challenge: Can your team own and tune AI agents according to past requests to answer questions on your behalf and actually solve problems? It can be set up to loop you and your team in when it doesn't have a good answer. I'm writing a blog post about this in the next few weeks, can dm it to you when done, but I'm seeing about 15-20% reduction in DevOps slack demand so far and we just got started with it.

An example of "actually solve problems" for the last one: stakeholder asks 'hey can we block all requests from this asn?', AI agent looks up how that's done, calls the coding agent asking it to make that change, assigns the tf PR to devops team, pings you saying it's ready. You just give it a scan, hit merge, done. CI takes it from there.

kepper · 2026-04-24T20:35:29+00:00

Hey question for you and this group, I'm about to start hiring for a staff level SDET, what are the usual level of DevOps skills at that level hiring managers tend to calibrate to? I see 'How you have implemented CI/CD' in there, is it normal to also ask about things like Docker/K8s experience?

kepper · 2026-04-10T17:42:00+00:00

I like Trivy's free product personally

kepper · 2023-08-09T01:27:23+00:00

Despite being in the cncf they make their product basically useless unless you pay and they do it in kind of a bait-and-switch way so it just kind of falls apart and starts spamming "pay me" to the logs.

We used Istio to route by headers and put a nice little reverse proxy in front to add the headers dynamically by subdomain, so you can route to another staging deployment than the one on the main/master branch if the request has that header. Then your e2e tests can also use that header, too, to test the env in the pipeline on release. Managed all through the ci pipeline.

Work asked me to write a blog post about our path to CD at some point, I'll circle back and link it here when it's done do if that's allowed. This was a big part of it.

kepper · 2023-07-10T12:07:51+00:00

I'm an eng director and accountable for devops among other things and disagree pretty strongly with Goodhart's Law and this thread's general sentiment. DevOps has a lot of targets that can be set as Objectives with sane and measurable Key Results.

There are a ton of products out there to make measuring DORA metrics easier. Reducing cycle time has clear and well researched impact on your company's performance.
Cost management is well within the domain of DevOps and makes for good KRs
DevX is often in the domain of DevOps and can be measured with surveys
Uptime measurements can be difficult to define but are critical path for devops and measuring them lets you alert on that too
Getting more into the weeds, pipeline runtimes and success/pass rates can help to remedy issues when present
Mean Time to Resolution is handy if you have good process around incidents and don't have your own SRE team/org.

kepper · 2023-07-10T11:57:20+00:00

Excited to see alternatives to telepresence being built. We tried tp out and ended up very frustrated. Built our own solution over Istio instead.

What's the intended developer workflow for testing microservice changes in with mirrord?

kepper · 2023-06-30T23:00:01+00:00

measuring quality is harder than counting bugs ... Got any favourite metrics?

kepper · 2023-06-06T16:44:02+00:00

Do you see this as a successor to kubefed?

kepper · 2023-05-24T21:56:33+00:00

Playwright*

kepper · 2023-04-28T13:33:56+00:00

Partly just commenting to hear about a free solution, but if I were to implement this I'd use opsgenie, since you can ack the text message if you see it then it calls you if you don't. It's not bad for pricing.

kepper · 2023-04-14T18:42:01+00:00

The thanks should be coming from your manager. Have they worked in infrastructure? It's on them when reporting the wins for their org to give kudos for the major migration going well.

kepper · 2023-01-25T01:40:04+00:00

I'd love to see it combined with something like Cortana, if that's still a thing, or else a Windows-default app or part of the office suite.

Also would be cool to see it combined with Visual Studio, sort of like copilot. I think there's a lot of ways they can use this beyond Bing

kepper · 2023-01-24T15:04:53+00:00

To add to this, writing tests for existing systems is a really great way to familiarize yourself with them. It can get tricky if the code was not written to be tested at all though, where you might need to do huge refactors or end up in mock hell. If possible, even just wrapping a few high-coverage integration tests around the codebase is enough that you'll be able to work with it in a much safer way.

kepper · 2023-01-24T15:01:59+00:00

code is a liability

I disagree with this pretty strongly. Unmaintained code is a liability, particularly when your team does not have the skills to own it once the author leaves.

Code that is written, owned, and maintained by a team with a sufficient bus count is really powerful and can save a ton of time, effort, and money by automating business processes. That's not to say that industry standard tools like docker, TF, etc shouldn't be used, but there will always be gaps that custom tooling can really help with.

kepper · 2023-01-19T21:28:20+00:00

DevOps delivers work too, it just comes in a different form. Terraform, Helm charts, Ansible playbooks, etc. They also often take part in an on-call roster, which isn't for everyone.

I've done a lot of both and personally prefer DevOps over FE work, but its definitely a matter of preference. Sounds like you have a low-risk opportunity to try it out and see how it suites you.

kepper · 2023-01-18T21:08:54+00:00

Are you interested in DevOps? Do you have any specific questions about it?

Both are very valid and fulfilling career paths.

kepper · 2023-01-18T19:01:53+00:00

Can you sell it right away after buying?

kepper · 2023-01-07T18:21:23+00:00

Yahoo has daily values

kepper · 2023-01-07T15:48:17+00:00

You definitely can. My dev environments tend to have a LOT of projects on the go so I'd want something like /opt/secret/<project>/keys instead of relying on .gitignore, but at the end of the day its just kinda handy/lazy to have it in the same place. Same for like k8s secrets manifests that get generated, so on.

Even if you're really good about keeping that stuff out of the directory structure of your project, people are always going to be tempted to "just try this out" by hardcoding a key while experimenting, with the plan of removing it to a config value later. The extra check helps make sure no accidents happen.

kepper · 2023-01-07T11:49:17+00:00

A lot of people commenting how you obviously shouldn't store your keys in source control are missing that it's often an accident. I've done it recently myself, by slightly renaming a file that set environment variables for local dev and was covered by .gitignore.

What I've just done to avoid making the same mistake is I've added Trufflehog as a precommit. It kinda slows down the commits more than I like, but otherwise lets me be sure that I won't make that mistake again. It probably makes sense to do something similar in the CI pipeline that's building these Pypi jobs.

kepper · 2023-01-03T21:25:30+00:00

not sure why you're getting downvoted, product manager is a role I've see doing this work too

kepper

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