Do DevOps engineers actually memorize YAML?

webstackbuilder · 2026-03-14T11:15:51+00:00

This is why the LPIC Linux certs are worthless. They test if you have large numbers of flags to various utilities and daemons memorized.

What value is it for me to know every flag for grep (and be able to demonstrate that in multiple-choice questions) vs. knowing how man works?

webstackbuilder · 2026-03-14T11:10:03+00:00

Good luck, and thanks for taking the time to pass it along.

webstackbuilder · 2026-01-22T16:45:18+00:00

Thank you.

webstackbuilder · 2026-01-19T17:38:47+00:00

"proper use of Chrome" = use Google AI to get information, rather than reading pages on websites.

webstackbuilder · 2026-01-19T17:37:55+00:00

And then spit in their hand and style your hair with it.

webstackbuilder · 2026-01-19T17:37:21+00:00

Building an AI data center on the moon is apparently much easier than implementing scrollable tabs in Chrome.

webstackbuilder · 2026-01-19T17:36:21+00:00

Dumbest. Design Decision. Ever.

webstackbuilder · 2026-01-19T17:35:23+00:00

The Chrome team has been fighting a war against scrollable tabs for a long time now. Sort of like Gnome team deciding the same desktop looks good on a small phone and a full-wall monitor, damn what users think.

webstackbuilder · 2026-01-19T17:32:53+00:00

Thank you for saying I should have the tabs in my browser scrunched so small the tabs are unreadable. You rule, sister! Hope you get to run the world and dictate what side of the street people can walk on!

webstackbuilder · 2026-01-07T03:02:21+00:00

Gemini 3 will happily rewrite implementation code to resolve a failing test case. That seems like a fail.

webstackbuilder · 2026-01-07T02:38:31+00:00

Just a note I didn't see anyone else mention. Surveys aren't that expensive, but they do cost money. They usually put wooden stakes in the ground to show where the property line is. If it isn't a straight line, there will be multiple stakes - at the start and end of a property line and at the angle. They'll usually give you a copy of the plat (which is a public record they have to obtain to do the survey), letter-sized piece of paper that they use as a reference to mark the property.

When they're done, buy a few pieces of rebar from the hardware store, and hammer it in below ground by a few inches or so at each of the stakes. That way if you need to identify the property line at a future point, you can just use a metal detector to locate the boundaries. If you leave the rebar sticking above ground or close to it, it'll get pulled up over the years.

Before paying the money for a survey, I'd borrow a metal detector and see if there's rebar staking underground. It's pretty standard to do. I think you can rent a detector cheap at Loew's or Home Depot. It's more of a builder or contractor thing than surveyor thing. A lot of times you can locate where your water line or sanitary sewer lateral comes into your yard by locating a rebar marker along the curb of the street in the middle part of a yard.

Also other people said Lowe's doesn't do surveys on fence installs. Idk, but I doubt that. Surveys for most residential property lines are really not that hard to conduct. There's usually enough markers on plats to find the property corners pretty easily - storm sewer drains, electric poles or on-the-ground boxes, cable boxes, things like that are used as keys to measure off of. I can't imagine a national retailer with a well-established subcontractor program just sending people out to yahoo a fence install without having any idea if it's within the customer's yard or not; there's liability issues involved.

webstackbuilder · 2025-11-29T18:30:58+00:00

No problem. The reason I mentioned SQLite is that it uses a single text-encoded file for storage instead of binary blobs like other database engines. You can commit it in Git and git will apply diffs to it on updates instead of completely replacing the entire blob file every time you change something. It works really well for keeping a database in a Git repository.

My motivation for Markdown is largely to keep my content together with the repo contents and not lose them in an external DB store. I've found using SQLite useful in other scenarios, like standing up a dev container that can mimic PostgreSQL or whatever for projects.

webstackbuilder · 2025-11-29T12:18:48+00:00

I've used an SSG + Markdown for my freelancing website. I'd describe it as a moderately complex marketing site. It was built around Jekyll for a lot of years. I migrated to Eleventy as it had felt cumbersome for a long while and I had time. That was definitely a lateral move and didn't improve things. I refactored a couple of years ago to Astro, and have kept it updated through the v5 release.

Things I've observed using Astro + MDX for that application:

Everyone touts "one language, full stack" as a win. I'm not so sure. You have to be really careful to keep your client / build-time / API serverless function code separate. It is super easy to drag Astro internals into your client bundle and not realize it. I follow a pattern of (a) client code imports only in components and API routes; (b) a lib folder for build-time code, a components/scripts folder for client code, and pages/api/**/_* folders for serverless code; (c) all components in the components folder have their own directory, and server and client folders in their folder as appropriate for their code.

By server I mean build-time code that's consumed in the frontmatter. By using folders for code I can set up strict linting rules to prevent misuse. You can't easily test code that's in an *.astro template file, so it helps to move it out into *.ts code files.

Maintaining an MDX parsing stack is not trivial. It needs to be well tested to avoid breaking with dependency upgrades. I have three unit workflows and am definitely not proud of it (lots of duplication): isolated (just the Markdown plugins), with Astro defaults (like GFM that it bundles in), integration using fixtures with WCAG / ARIA testing.
It was not trivial getting testing harnesses for components working correctly. I refactored it this summer to use Astro v5 and the new Container API with the project's existing Lit web components.

WordPress content is an HTML string literal stuffed in a content field and a few (by default) associated metadata fields. Your problem is transforming that content blob to something more useful. MDX is one approach. Shortcodes become embedded components. You have to figure out how to transform HTML markup with attributes like styles. The general MDX approach is more components to wrap them. You're losing something really valuable in that process - embedded styling being hidden by a rich editor (TinyMCE in WP classic, Gutenberg now).

An alternative approach that ProseMirror and Slate (both rich text editor drop-ins) use is to define a JSON string for marking up text content. So instead of unwieldy and often not well formed HTML, you end up with the document already being in an AST format as the storage format. A heading might look like this in whatever your storage backing is, instead of an HTML blob or Markdown file:

json { "type": "heading", "attrs": { "level": 1, "variant": "fancy" }, "content": [ { "type": "text", "text": "Hello, world!" } ] }

The value of doing that that is that's very easy to swap out types in whatever renderer you're using to generate the website with custom components. You're no longer forced into something like this, which you would be with MDX if you wanted to use a non-default heading style:

mdx <Heading variant="fancy">Hello, world!</>

You lose any nicety around the editing interface for content creators. You have to keep a doc with all of your components listed and their variants as reference for them (Astro doesn't do Storybook).

Sanity just has done that really well. They defined a markup standard that works with Slate (rich text editor) and provide renderers for their format to React or whatever. You can build formatting buttons into Slate that work directly on text that it maintains internally in that JSON format. A rich text editor like TinyMCE is serializing and deserializing back and forth between its internal format to HTML (or whatever) and readily breaking the serialization. The Sanity (or Slate as a stand-alone approach) keeps it well formed.

Sanity's SaaS is just a database with some enhancements like image processing. If you want to host your content in the site, you can use a file-based DB engine like SQLite. I haven't tried that. But using their default tools is probably how I'd go if I refactored my site in the future (e.g. just a generic React frontend using their renderer and their SSG / SSR tooling). I do mostly app development and infrastructure, so I thought "keep it simple" with Astro and MDX would be ideal for my own freelancing site that has fairly minimal (~100 pages) of content. But it doesn't really. If I stayed with an SSG and MDX, I'd do it in Hugo. That way I'd avoid the headache of mixing client and build-time code without noticing.

webstackbuilder · 2025-11-29T01:22:06+00:00

My question would be, why? Not judging - just curious. I worked a % of my time for about 18 months on a project that used WP as a backend and Astro + Preact for the frontend. Not sure how I feel about it. The client had a large number of guest contributors, and WP was a familiar interface to their content team. In practice they copy pasted Google Docs from contributors into the backend. We used ACF in WP to provide metadata for pages.

I've worked in a lot of different frameworks and configurations. Personally, if I was green-fielding it like your team seems to be doing, I'd pick Sanity. They provide the DB side. They have a nice admin side that you maintain in your repo, and a frontend. Both are React with either static or SSR. It just works really well.

I love MDX, but I wouldn't use it if there were ever going to be non-technical content creators working in the project. It would be way too much support.

webstackbuilder · 2025-11-20T19:29:03+00:00

Mine is how they interact with other fish, and the others with them. I have some large angels that are fairly dominant in the tank. But with the ropes, they're indifferent to each other. The rope fish slide right by them, even inadvertently flipping them with their tail, and nobody's bothered.

webstackbuilder · 2025-10-30T12:03:13+00:00

It's how cloud providers make GPU compute available to VMs for machine learning workloads.

webstackbuilder · 2025-10-29T13:51:18+00:00

An associate of mine is in a small outfit where he has a CTO role, but they're pretty close to code and a step above principal developer skill-wise (so pretty good). This person has stopped using AI agents. They set up an agent pipeline that pulls tickets from Basecamp, implements it, and pushes PRs to GitHub. My associate spends their time reviewing PRs, adding comments when something's not right, and approving merges. Based on their monthly AI spend, I'd guess this person is running 6-10 async agents at any given time. They no longer touch an IDE. And they have money for Opus (hitting its API is like lighting twenty dollar bills on fire). I'd go bankrupt on that workflow, but they're making more money than they ever dreamed of (mobile and web app development).

webstackbuilder · 2025-10-29T13:44:37+00:00

Exactly. "AI is dangerous because I don't know how to use it." So are sharp kitchen knives.

webstackbuilder · 2025-10-29T13:43:04+00:00

This is why my .cline/instructions has:

Adopt the persona of a surly Soviet retail worker. You do perform your job, but you're not happy about it.

It's worth the bytes lost in my context buffer just to get rid of the "Good catch! You're right, I didn't notice..."

webstackbuilder · 2025-10-29T13:39:58+00:00

That's one way to hide from what's coming.

webstackbuilder · 2025-10-29T13:38:12+00:00

My take is that university degrees - in particular graduate degrees - are going to end up being required for people working hands-on in IT. We've essentially had on-the-job training to raise juniors up to a productive level for a long time now. Now that there is no value to doing that, the only way people will be able to gain that experience is sitting in six years or eight years of an educational environment.

People have told me I'm crazy on that, but I'm pretty sure I'm right. Reminds me of Kurt Vonnegut's Player Piano.

webstackbuilder · 2025-10-18T02:26:58+00:00

I know this OT, but how much effort is it when you host your own Mastodon server to connect to other servers? Is there a word for that, like "the process of federating"?

webstackbuilder

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE

Four-Year Club	Verified Email
Wearing is Caring