CatOps

08 Jul 2025 18:12

A small article about software development in the time of AI -
Writing Code Was Never The Bottleneck.

As the name suggests, this article is about the fact that although many vendors try to sell their AI coding tools as a "replacement for the developers", the blockers that those tools remove were never the biggest ones.

There are companies that understand that and encourage their employees to do "assisted" development, which in turn can yield great results, if people are not afraid of being fired. What a surprise...

#ai #programming

CatOps

04 Jul 2025 11:10

Security researches from WIZ have a fun capture the flag challenge for you!

It has monthly challenges and a leaderboard. Feel free to participate!

#security

CatOps

01 Jul 2025 10:20

Under daily routine, it's easy sometimes to forget, why we've gotten into the industry in the first place.

This is where pet-projects come in handy. Also, they are great for learning! Unfortunately, the "pet-project" term got a commercialized a bit. However, this article gave me a new term - "toy software"! I'm gonna use it from now on.

There are a few examples of such toy software that the author wrote through the years. Almost all those examples look super-complex to me. However, one need to understand that each of us has different expertise, and thus different things look easy or hard to each of us. I can easily think of a couple of examples of such platform-related toy software one could build. For example, Cost Exporter really took maybe a week, if I don't account for all the procrastination time.

#programming

CatOps

26 Jun 2025 13:19

Ktea - pronounced "K-tea" - is a TUI client for Kafka that allows you to see the topics and consumer groups, produce and consume messages, etc.

It's a bit rough and you may need to configure the Meta button for your terminal (can be a bit of a PITA on MacOS), but otherwise it may be useful!

Another way of working with Kafka in more or less visual way is kafka-ui from Provectus. It's a web GUI, but it can be spun up locally in Docker.

#kafka

CatOps

23 Jun 2025 10:53

​​My friend is raising 300k UAH for a pickup truck for the 28th brigade.

Your help is greatly appreciated!

https://send.monobank.ua/jar/6dbYCchqSh

#donations #Ukraine

CatOps

20 Jun 2025 11:53

Time to update your passwords, or at least check if you've been pwned. Also, make sure to have MFA configured for your important accouts.

16 billion passwords exposed in record-breaking data breach, opening
access to Facebook, Google, Apple, and any other service imaginable

#security

CatOps

18 Jun 2025 18:27

Apple has apparently realized that the big chunk of their customers are tech companies.

So, we are closer to get a native Linux container implementation, or rather the official implementation, in macOS 26 (Tahoe).

An interesting thing about this implementation is that instead of spinning a single big VM for all the containers, which is pretty much what all the existing implementations do; Apple chose to have micro-VMs for each container. In any case, I don't think this implementation detail would impact the UX a lot.

#apple #containers

CatOps

16 Jun 2025 10:08

​​​​For today's Donations Monday, I want to share with you a fundraiser by DOU.ua.

They are raising 20M UAH (~€42k) for reconnaissance drones for the 3rd Assault Brigade.

Here's the direct link to the Monobank Jar:
https://send.monobank.ua/jar/AGK8qiQwQX

There is also a raffle for donations of more than 300UAH. If you know to know more about the raffle, as well as about the fundraiser itself, check out the dedicated page (information is in Ukrainian):
https://dou.ua/triyka/

#donations #Ukraine

CatOps

13 Jun 2025 10:30

Yet another bundle of programming books on HumbleBundle. This one is from No Starch Press, who usually have good books.

#books

CatOps

11 Jun 2025 10:44

Figma runs in Kubernetes. How can I be sure? By reading their blog post How we migrated onto K8s in less than 12 months.

This blog post doesn't dive deep into technical details, but it provides a glimpse of what technologies are used by Figma to manage their infrastructure.

What I liked about this article is that they have "in less than 12 months" right in the title! I think, more articles should provide realistic timelines, especially when talking about production systems under load. "Kubernetes up & running in 30 minutes" have its own merit, but not in prod.

#kubernetes

CatOps

07 Jun 2025 13:14

A very nice overview (with examples) of Wardley maps & Pace Layering - methods that can help you building a technical strategy at your company, and reason about planning and budgeting.

#leadership #strategy

CatOps

03 Jun 2025 11:22

A bundle of book bundles for you today. There were a couple of bundles released recently, so I just grouped them together.

1. ML/AI books by O'Reilly
2. Learn to program by Pearson
3. Cybersecurity and forensics by Pearson

Just keep in mind that often Humble Bundle shares reoccurring bundles. So, always check your library before the purchase :)

#books #ml #ai #security #programming

CatOps

01 Jun 2025 11:36

A new issue of the CatOps Newsletter is here!

https://newsletter.catops.dev/p/catops-digest-2025-06-01

#newsletter #digest

CatOps

27 May 2025 10:48

On Describing Not Explaining is a neat life-story that unveils a way of reasoning about incident investigations.

The gist is that instead of guessing what could possibly happen (an instinctive approach), you try to describe what exactly happened and in what order. Just saying this out loud can help you to cut off many unlikely causes, and also may help you to remember some less obvious recent changes.

#sre #incidents

CatOps

24 May 2025 11:00

A great concise explainer-article about PostgreSQL.

It’s needless to say, how popular is Postgres in the industry. This article covers topics of:

- Connection management
- WAL
- MVCC
- Query execution
- Indexing
- Table partitioning
- Logical decoding
- Extensions
- Statistics collector

So, a quite excessive list actually. My only two nitpicks are:

- When talking about MVCC, there’s a phase that sounds as if locks do not exist in Postgres. They pretty much do! Moreover, it’s crucial to pay attention to what locks what operations acquire. I usually use this reference to double-check.
- When talking about the query planning, there’s article doesn’t explain the subtle difference between EXPLAIN and EXPLAIN ANALYZE. The latter actually runs a query under the hood, which may be ok for SELECT queries, but likely not for inserts and updates.

Apart from this small things, this is a very good article!

#databases #postgres

CatOps

07 Jul 2025 11:30

​​My wife is helping to raise funds for the repair shop for the "Omega Wings" unit. They have a unit that takes care of ground drones, and while there are the drones themselves, those require routine maintenance and occasional repairs.

So, these funds are aimed for the equipment for their repair shop: both tools and materials.

The main goal is 300k UAH, this helper jar is 20k.

https://send.monobank.ua/jar/5XD1eci1Ac

I would greatly appreciate your help! 2/3 of the helper jar is already there, so we can easily close it today!

#donations #Monday

CatOps

03 Jul 2025 13:07

A new issue of the CatOps Newsletter is out!

https://newsletter.catops.dev/p/catops-digest-2025-07-03

#digest #newsletter

CatOps

30 Jun 2025 13:27

​​​​For today’s Donations Monday, I’d like to remind you about the fundraiser that DOU has started for the 3rd Assault Brigade.

They are raising 20M UAH (~€410k) for reconnaissance drones for the 3rd Assault Brigade.

Here's the direct link to the Monobank Jar:
https://send.monobank.ua/jar/AGK8qiQwQX

There is also a raffle for donations of more than 300UAH. If you know to know more about the raffle, as well as about the fundraiser itself, check out the dedicated page (information is in Ukrainian):
https://dou.ua/triyka/

#donations #Ukraine

CatOps

25 Jun 2025 21:16

How We Load Test Argo CD at Scale: 1,000 vClusters with GitOps on Kubernetes.

An interesting benchmark of ArgoCD. While the setup is somewhat too specific (vCluster), this benchmark provides some insights into the limitations of ArgoCD at scale. There are also manifests available, so you can reproduce the experiment (using some YAML generation with Bash :D)

#kubernetes #gitops #argocd

CatOps

21 Jun 2025 09:54

Denys Vasyliev shares the challenges AI brings to contemporary SRE practices.

Not in terms of some autogenerated code breaking production, although that also happens, but in terms of how can we access the reliability of AI interfaces, and what the word “reliability” even means in the age of AI.

Also, make sure to subscribe to his Telegram channel (in Ukrainian), if you haven’t already.

#ai #sre

CatOps

19 Jun 2025 14:58

A quick explainer for the caching strategies. It's concise, but it would be useful, if you're preparing for a system design interview, or thinking of implementing caching in your app.

#system_design

CatOps

17 Jun 2025 15:29

I'm experimenting with the day of digest. So, here's the new issue:
https://newsletter.catops.dev/p/catops-digest-2025-06-17

#digest #newsletter

CatOps

14 Jun 2025 10:11

Who would win: a null pointer crash loop or a multi-billion dollar corporation?

And here we have a postmortem of the recent Google’s outage.

P.S. Kudos to Google for releasing this postmortem so quickly!

#postmortem

CatOps

12 Jun 2025 11:49

This article is quite old, but it's interesting nonetheless, since it describes an approach rather than a specific technology.

Moreover, it describes a phenomenon that was identified long time ago. However, here Slack shows how they used it to adopt (or discard) software within the company. Sure, such an approach would work better in larger organizations, but it's still interesting to read about.

#culture

CatOps

10 Jun 2025 15:33

To analyze the data, one has to collect it first. So, I'd like to invite you to participate in two ongoing surveys:

- 2025 Stack Overflow Developer Survey - an annual survey from a very important (albeit not so popular anymore) engineering resource (in English).
- DOU Salary survey - an annual survey of the Ukrainian community (in Ukrainian).

#random

CatOps

05 Jun 2025 12:04

All talks today are about AI: models, agents, RAGs, MCPs, editors, etc.

In this article, Arseniy Zinchenko explains what is an MCP (model context protocol) with an example.

And in the follow-up article, he expands the example by writing a basic MCP for Victoria Logs.

BTW, if you're still not subscribed to his Substack, make sure to subscribe! Arseniy posts some great technical content there and makes it quite regularly.

#ai

CatOps

02 Jun 2025 09:29

​​Let’s close the last week’s fundraiser today for good! There’s not that much left.

​A friend of mine's recon team is getting a Shark complex, but they need a trailer to move it!

This powerful UAV needs a two-axle trailer for transport. Let's help them get it.

Donate to get us closer to giving them the mobility they need:

- Monobank jar: https://send.monobank.ua/jar/9hNbCnoiN1
- Card: 4441 1111 2429 2776

#donations #Ukraine

CatOps

28 May 2025 14:44

I think, I first encountered this tool in Den Vasyliev's channel. Kubeshark - a network observability tool for Kubernetes.

Network observability comes handy at times. So, here are some other tools and articles one can use to capture packets in your sustem.

- ksniff - a Kubectl plugin to capture traffic
- Hubble - an observability tool for Cilium
- How to use debug containers to capture the traffic - basically running tcpdump inside a pod
- A hands on lab on how to run tcpdump in a pod


Happy capturing!

#kubernetes #networking

CatOps

26 May 2025 09:30

​A friend of mine's recon team is getting a Shark complex, but they need a trailer to move it!

This powerful UAV needs a two-axle trailer for transport. Let's help them get it.

Donate to get us closer to giving them the mobility they need:

- Monobank jar: https://send.monobank.ua/jar/9hNbCnoiN1
- Card: 4441 1111 2429 2776

#donations #Ukraine

CatOps

22 May 2025 12:44

​​🎉 On this day, 8 years ago, this channel was created 🎉

I find it to be a big accomplishment: being able to take care of it for so long and also keep somewhat consistent posts schedule! In these 8 years, CatOps grew to more than 5k subscribers, we had our voice chats (although irregular), and a newsletter.

I've led CatOps longer than I stayed at any job. Heck! In these years, I've changed jobs 3 times and moved countries. Yet, this channel is still here. This is cool, but also a bit weird at the same time.

It all is possible because of you! Thank you for keep reading CatOps, reacting to the posts, and sharing them. For real, I have an idea of abandoning it for good many times, Each time though, I thought: well, but at least someone finds it interesting.

If you enjoy CatOps, and you want to make us a small present, you can do it by donating to Hospitallers using this Monobank Jar:

https://send.monobank.ua/jar/9aHg73XmQm

#catops #birthday