This is the first (multi-part) episode of critchat. In it, I read submissions to my first prompt, “Speechless”: Write a story with a conversation without using any dialogue.

Let’s say you have an automation tool that patches your servers. What patches the server hosting the automation tool? Is it, as the ancients believed, turtles all the way down?

The introduction episode of my writing podcast, critchat.

Docker containers are awesome little throwaway environments. Often I like to jump into a container to test something out, like installing a project from scratch, swapping runtimes without needing a version manager, or trying something new without gumming up my base system. It’s also useful for debugging problems in other Linux distributions or as a quick approximation of some remote machine.

I’ve recently come into the opinion that every hardware enthusiast should own at least two machines: one good one — and one really crap one.

So you’ve spun up a fresh Linux Workspace and discovered in short order that it is ugly as sin. Fret not, this is as configurable a Linux machine as any — but in different ways than you might be used to.

Amazon WorkSpaces are virtual desktops in the cloud. As designed, they’re an office sysadmin’s dream: a simple thin client, integration with Active Directory, and the ability to rebuild WorkSpaces from scratch with the click of a button. But how are they as a personal desktop? I decided to find out.

Quick tip for those of you who have just discovered a pip package you’d like to fix or otherwise contribute to.

I’m starting on some new projects soon, projects I would very much like to be stateless and highly available. Partially because I like to think of myself as a grown-up developer now who wants to code things the way they ought to be; mostly because I’m a lazy sysadmin who would rather not have to scramble just because the cloud decided to rain that day.

WebM is probably the future, but like all things containing the word “web,” there’s an element of nuance and surprise that emerges while working with it.