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Mastering Async Communication in a Remote World

This is one of my favorite posts/documents I have written. I wrote it during the pandemic (2020–21), when InfraCloud, the organization I work with, decided to go fully remote. It was published at infracloud.io on 11th April 2023: Mastering Async Communication in a Remote World. As a remote first organization, we encourage everyone to follow asynchronous communication while working with our peers and customers at InfraCloud. This article about writing better messages is directly from our internal handbook.

RepRap 3D printer revision 2

Previously, I wrote about the first revision of our RepRap machine based on Prusa i3 printer. This is a project which I have been working with my younger brother. I will be talking about the enhancements, issues, and learnings from the second build of the printer. 3D printed printer parts As soon as we got the first build of the printer working, we started printing printer parts. Basically, the idea is to replace the wooden parts with 3D printed parts which have way better precision.

EmacsConf 2021

EmacsConf 2021 happened in November last year. Same as last two years, it was an online conference. Thanks to all the volunteers and organizers, it was a great experience. EmacsConf is the conference about the joy of Emacs, Emacs Lisp, and memorizing key sequences. — EmacsConf website. It was a 2 days conference with 45 talks in total. Despite being a thanksgiving weekend, the peak count of attendees was around 300.

Using GNU Emacs in Linux Foundation exam

I cleared the Certified Kubernetes Security Specialist (CKS) exam recently. It is an exam where one has to perform tasks on the clusters to solve the scenario based questions. In this post, I will be talking on how I used GNU Emacs in the exam environment. Though I’m referring to CKS here, this post should be helpful for other exams by Linux Foundation like CKA, CKAD, etc. The exam environment Before we get to Emacs related details, let’s understand the CKS exam environment.

Building RepRap 3D printer

My younger brother goes by the name HemRobotics almost everywhere. I have been working with him on a 3D printer build. We completed the first build of our RepRap machine based on Prusa i3 printer. I will be talking about our experience and learnings from this project. Why did we build a 3D printer? It’s a hacker’s dream to have a 3D printer on their desk. I had seen 3D printers on television when I was in school.

Multi-Region YugabyteDB Deployments on Kubernetes with Istio

Istio has support for connecting multiple Kubernetes clusters together by enabling the discovery and connectivity of pods and services across different clusters seamlessly. We will be using Istio’s multicluster mesh to set up a secure Kubernetes environment across three different Kubernetes clusters from different regions. We will then deploy a YugabyteDB cluster in this environment which will span over three geographical regions and enable synchronous replication across these three regions.

Removing Comments and Disqus

After moving away from Google Fonts, Google Analytics, I also removed Disqus comments from my website. Instead of implementing an alternative commenting system, I decided to remove it altogether. I will be covering why I did it, and how I’m showing the old comments from Disqus statically on the website. Why am I removing the comments? This was not a very easy decision to take. But finally I took the decision to remove the commenting system, and here are the reasons:

Self-hosting Plausible Analytics

In the efforts of making my website privacy-friendly, I moved away from Google Analytics. This was the next step after self-hosting fonts for the website. I have been self-hosting Plausible Analytics since last 3 months. I will be covering why I did it, how I’m hosting it on my VPS, the email setup, and more. Why do I need analytics? Before we get to any further details, why do I even want analytics in the first place?

Monitoring Kubernetes cert-manager Certificates with BotKube

The monitoring and alerting stack is a crucial part of the SRE practices. That’s where BotKube helps you monitor your Kubernetes cluster and send notifications to your messaging platform or any other configured sink. In this blog post, we will be configuring BotKube to watch the Kubernetes cert-manager certificates CustomResources. The blog post was published at infracloud.io on 12th May 2021. Monitoring Kubernetes cert-manager Certificates with BotKube

Writing Emacs Lisp to convert ICS to Org mode list

A couple of months back David O’Toole (dto) taught me basics of Emacs Lisp (Elisp). These were things like lists, symbols, functions, debugging and a few more things. After the session I was consciously observing my workflows, so that I can make improvements to them by writing Elisp. We wrote one such fuction during the session, but I had not written anything apart from that. Recently, I wrote an Elisp function to convert event entries from an ICS (iCalendar file) to Org mode list.