Beginning of this year I set myself a couple of professional goals. After architecting and developing software on AWS for some years, I’m currently working with a private on-premises cloud and wanted to look into AWS again. Thus, I decided to do the AWS Solutions Architect Associate exam. It is a tough exam! It requires broad knowledge of many AWS service. The question domains of the exam are based on the five pillars of the AWS well architected framework. more...

Hetzer Cloud is a cheap cloud provider with datacenters in Germany and a nifty API. I used it to host a video conferencing platform for my kids’ school. While there is an excellent Terraform provider for Hetzner Cloud, I couldn’t find one for their DNS service and decided to implement a provider on my own. You can find the Terraform provider hetznerdns on GitHub. In this post I share what would have saved me some hours searching the web and what I wish I knew before. more...

If you run your software on Kubernetes, you probably don’t deploy a new version to a cluster from your local machine. Instead, you would push your changes to a version-control system. This would start a pipeline which builds the code, run some tests, build a Docker image, and at some point deploys a new version to a cluster. Typically, it doesn’t deploy directly to production, but to stage, pre-prod, or test. more...

You can read a lot about 1-on-1s and why you should have some with your team on the web. However, especially as a first time manager I wondered how to get started. How would the first 1-on-1 be? What questions should I ask? What want I get out of the first 1-on-1? I started with three questions. “What are your favorite things to work on?” and “What have your past managers done that you’d like me to also do or not do? more...