CatOps Digest 2025-02-02
The first digest of 2025...
Welcome back to the CatOps digest! This is the first issue of the new 2025 year. Frankly, I don’t remember when I started this Substack, but I do remember when the Telegram channel was started back in 2017.
This year, I’d like to be more active on Substack, but let’s see. This is particularly ironic to say, given that I missed the whole month already. On the flip side, you have more things in a digest. So, here you are.
Charity
Time Sensitive
A book bundle about databases on Humble Bundle - about a week left.
Courses for AWS certification on Humble Bundle - less than a week left.
Linux & Operations books bundle on Humble Bundle - about two weeks left.
Voice Chat
We have recorded a Christmas edition of our voice chat (in Ukrainian)! Frankly, it has nothing to do with Christmas itself, it’s just coincided by time. The topic was technical certification and if they are useful. I know that there was a big gap between this and the previous voice chat. So, could it be a start of the second season? Only time can tell…
The episode is available on YouTube, Spotify, and other platforms.
Digest
Demystifying ArgoCD's ApplicationSet - Part I, Part II - an article from a member of our community about ArgoCD.
Reverse Interviewing Your Future Manager and Team - an old article from Gergely Orosz about so-called reverse interview i.e. what questions to ask your future team when you’re applying.
The 40+ Best Questions to Ask at a Job Interview - similar reverse-interview questionary. The website itself is about Berlin, but questions are not city-specific.
An online calculator for DataDog costs - estimating DataDog costs can be very tricky. This post and the calculator are meant to help you with this. Keep in mind, though, that DataDog has many special discounts, so your mileage can wary.
Breaking down OpenAI's outage: How to avoid a hidden DNS dependency in Kubernetes - some guessing work regarding an OpenAI outage that nevertheless highlights some caveats of the Kubernetes DNS.
The Evolution of SRE at Google - folks who helped to coin the term “SRE” are reflecting on the modern challenges of this discipline and discuss how the control theory can help.
Concurrency in Bash - how to handle concurrency using just Bash (there is a neat overview of pipes inside!)
Observability in the Age of AI - some speculations from Honeycomb about how AI will shape the world of Observability and software engineering in general.
How to create a culture of ownership in your engineering team - how to foster a culture of ownership in your company if you’re a manager or a high-level individual contributor.
Unfortunate things about performance reviews - an article about the dark side of performance reviews.
An interview with Rory Sutherland in which he describes caveats of individual performance evaluation.
Socratic Questioning - "Meetings are a waste of time" - using some ancient philosophy hacks to answer eternal questions.
How AI-assisted coding will change software engineering: hard truths - two articles about AI impact on coding in one.
Everyone knows Canary Deployments, but do you know the Dark Read pattern? - yet another release pattern that you should know about.
An Engineer’s Checklist of Logging Best Practices - a neat checklist by Honeycomb.
That’s it. I would like to write more on Substack this year, but I cannot guarantee anything at this point. So, see you in the next digest!
Also, I’m at Fosdem conference at the moment, which is in Brussles and the next coupld of days I’ll be at the CfgMgmt Camp conference in Ghent. If you’re also here, come say hi!
