Reflections on Constructions of Qatar and Japan | ✉️ #11
Hey! 👋
The beginning of the year was quite busy for me. Luckily, I have a birthday in the beginning of February, always a good reason to have another small winter break. This year, I wrapped up the third decade of my life, making this vacation a good reason to reflect on life and on work.
As I write this, I happen to be in Doha, Qatar. Despite the World Cup and all the construction that happened here in preparation for it, Doha is pretty much a work in progress city. Still, it’s a good example of how much can change within a couple of decades, how many new things can emerge seemingly from nothing. And a reminder that future will bring even more.
IT is famous for the pace of change. Many technologies I personally work with on a daily basis either didn’t exist 10 years ago, or were in their alpha versions: Kubernetes and all of the cloud native ecosystem; public cloud providers and most of their services (AWS Lambda exists since 2014, as one example); Terraform was released in 2014 and didn’t become stable till many years later.
Buildings might stay with us way longer than new software tools. But maybe they don’t have to. Japan houses are famous for having a 30 years lifespan. Afterwards they are meant to be demolished, leaving the space for something fresh and new, opening possibilities for new ideas in architecture and urban planning. Even if something as seemingly permanent as houses can have a life of just a few decades, what’s the correct lifespan of a technology?
As I look back at my career, most of the tools became less widely used and applicable, or stopped being relevant, or changed in so many ways, that my initial experience with them is now obsolete.
The nature of software gives us the flexibility to rapidly build and extend more and more complex systems, systems, that are always work in progress and are always improving. But sometimes it’s better to demolish all of this, get back to the blank slate and try something new. New tools and systems that will become dominant in 5-10 years were either not released yet, or still didn’t leave the proof of concept stage. I am as excited as ever about what the future brings and what all of us together will create.
What We've Shared
Argo CD Installation and Architecture: In the first lesson proper of our Argo CD Lightning Course let's look at the installation process, as well as at some of the core components inside Argo CD!
Why so many layoffs? We've seen the news and we know that every day there are all these people getting fired, but what's the reason behind that?
How to connect Cloud Run and Cloud SQL internally? In this article we are going to learn how to change a Cloud SQL so that it uses an external IP to connect to Cloud Run to an internal IP and a serverless Cloud Connector.
Do Developers need Service Mesh? Service Mesh sounds like something focused on the infrastructure automation. It’s features around traffic management, observability and security are definitely exciting for any Infrastructure Engineer. But what about developers? Is there any reason for them to mess around with the Service Mesh? Let’s find out.
What We've Discovered
Time is an illusion, Unix time doubly so... Not practical for most of us, but still fascinating read about Unix time, how the epoch time appeared and what the problem of 2038 is about.
Tips and tricks for virtual K8s clusters: Virtual Kubernetes clusters seem like a nice balance between cluster and namespace based isolation. This presentation shares some examples and tricks on using vcluster, most popular implementation of virtual clusters.
Sturdy: A re-imagined version control that uses Git at its foundation. I am surprised, that it's the first time I see Git being used as a low-level API to power more advanced workflows.
How ChatGPT can wrote the entire Python Code for Binance Crypto Trading Bot is the topic of this article.
A random reminder
We have a new referral system! Here it is, just below this block. Give your personal link to people who might like the dispatch, get free stickers, mugs and t-shirts from us :)
The 12th mkdev dispatch will arrive on Friday, February 17th. See you next time!