The Passing of Years and Problem Solving | ✉️ #13

Illustration for "MKDEV DISPATCH #13" featuring a stylized portrait of a man with glasses and curly hair, accompanied by text "THE PASSING OF YEARS AND PROBLEM SOLVING" on a background with paper planes. Illustration for "MKDEV DISPATCH #13" featuring a stylized portrait of a man with glasses and curly hair, accompanied by text "THE PASSING OF YEARS AND PROBLEM SOLVING" on a background with paper planes.

Hey! 👋

Whenever people outside the IT world think of us “cyberspace” workers, they think of a geek with an average age of 20. But you can't always be 20 years old, and there is a moment when without realizing it, you end up being closer to 50 than to 40, and you no longer remember those beautiful 20s.

In the simile of soccer, one cannot play in a team forever, and little by little, one must take positions as a coach, team president, or even a prop man. And, of course, each time the years go by, it becomes heavier and more challenging to be up to date with all the details and all the commands. Every day more people are better than you, and you feel more like Cristiano Ronaldo each time, but without his excellent contract in Saudi Arabia.

But the problem is in the well-known pyramid effect because there are so many positions at the base that not every one can go up and be managers, directors, CTO, CEO, or any other X that you want to put between the "C" and the "O" And this is when little by little you are seeing more and more friends and acquaintances who are leaving the "cyberspace" market and going to the space of other less technical and more relaxed businesses.

But at the same time, I see more and more friends and acquaintances who take the leap and try to set up a business in our world, IT, without having to work for another. And this path is not easy, and it is always full of obstacles. The financial ones are always the first to appear, but you take a stone from your stomach when they disappear. There are labor and family problems because one changes their previous job of 8 hours for five days with paid vacations for one of 24 hours for seven days without breaks. There are bureaucratic problems and the company's administration and management, the problems of having different ideas from your partners, and many other problems. But at the end of the day, all these problems disappear when you see the excellent result and how beautiful it is to create something from scratch.

At the end you discover that a person who creates a company, whatever size it is, even if this is Amazon, a pub close to your house, a bakery, or a 100-employee IT company, is a problem solver.


What We've Shared

  • Working remotely, yes or no? One day we jumped from non-remote work to everyone working from home, but there are many options, and none of them are 100% correct.

  • How do deploy Applications within Projects in Argo CD? In the third lesson of our Argo CD Lightning Course we are finally going to deploy the application, by first placing it in a project!

  • Tools & Services for IT Consulting: What services can you use in your project and how much will it cost you? Since mkdev moved to business consulting, there have been some changes in the tools we use, and Kirill Shirinkin is back with an explanation of the behind the scenes of mkdev and our other projects.

  • Why and when do you need Argo CD? In addition to our Lightning Course! Do you need Argo CD? You don't know? Here are two main criteria you need to check before you rush to learn a new tool, discussed in detail by Kirill Shirinkin.


What We've Discovered

  • fx - terminal json viewer: We all need to examine a large JSON file sometimes. fx is a nice little tool that makes this daunting process way less irritating.

  • Hurl: A text-based tool to run HTTP requests, as well as write tests for those requests!

  • Klotho: CLI that takes CDK idea to the next level: instead of writing infrastructute code with regular language, you just write your application, add some annotations and Klotho creates appropriate infra for this app. Would you trust it, though?

  • Getting Started With Java Development in 2023 — An Opinionated Guide: In case you are just getting started with Java development, it's a good starting point. I would start with Gradle, though, and not Maven - because we are in 2023.

  • Authenticate to Amazon EKS using Google Workspace: If you are using Google Workspaces for your organization, and EKS to run K8s, then that's a great guide on implementing authentication to get access to the cluster.


A random teaser

DevOps Accents is our podcast you're probably familiar with by now. It used to go out once a month. It will now go out bi-weekly! Every week you don't get an mkdev dispatch, you'll get a podcast episode. 6th ep. of DevOps Accents is out next Friday, March 10th.


The 14th mkdev dispatch will arrive on Friday, March 17th. See you next time!