Blog

I write this blog to help me better express myself, and to practice thinking in public.

Here are some notable posts:

You can also view posts by tag.

Crossing the uncanny valley

Lately, I've been feeling a lot of anxiety about my role in the post-AI future. Without many answers, I decided to see what ChatGPT had to say.

Brett Weir, Apr 3, 2023, 9 mins

Installing things with style

The install command is profoundly useful and profoundly underrated. Learn how this tiny unassuming command can save a ton of scripting and make your installations cleaner and more robust.

Brett Weir, Mar 27, 2023, 6 mins

How to remove Rook from a Kubernetes cluster

If you're installing Rook for the first time, it'll probably take a few tries, but fully removing it from your cluster is more difficult than it looks. We'll walk through a simple procedure to restore your cluster to a Rook-free state.

Brett Weir, Mar 20, 2023, 5 mins

All the ways to write a string in YAML

There are multiple ways to represent a string in YAML, but it's not easy to know why you'd choose one over another. Here's a primer on YAML string syntax and why and when to use each one.

Brett Weir, Mar 13, 2023, 5 mins

The apt sandwich

Learn how to make your Debian-based containers dramatically smaller without having to switch to another base image.

Brett Weir, Mar 2, 2023, 4 mins

Schedule GitLab CI/CD pipelines with Terraform

You run a pipeline on every commit, right? But what if you haven't committed in awhile? In this article, we'll automate a weekly pipeline schedule to exercise all projects, active or not.

Brett Weir, Feb 27, 2023, 22 mins

Transfer files with ssh

Unix tools are designed to be useful in new ways that tool authors don't anticipate. In this article, we'll use ssh to re-create the functionality of scp.

Brett Weir, Feb 20, 2023, 12 mins

Write great command line utilities with Python

Learn how to create simple, standalone, useful Python CLI tools to solve even the most mundane infrastructure problems, so that you can start automating everything.

Brett Weir, Feb 13, 2023, 16 mins

Lighthouse testing with CI

If you want to really understand how something works, you gotta spend some time with it. Let's see what it would take to create our own Lighthouse CI/CD, without using the packaged solution.

Brett Weir, Feb 5, 2023, 17 mins

Use pyenv for local Python development

Learn how to use pyenv to bootstrap isolated Python installations, so that you can have the best of containers and local development.

Brett Weir, Jan 27, 2023, 5 mins