"Twenty years of data center, cloud, and Kubernetes ... written down so I don't forget."

Recent Posts

The Red Hat Platform

I’ve always had this feeling that if we really knew how to do IT “the right way” we wouldn’t have all these different tools and methods. Gitops vs deployment pipelines, declartive vs imperative commands, immutable containers vs mutable virtual machines. Of course over my career I’ve seen that no one method or tool is right for every situation. But I’ve always felt drawn to the utopian idea that there was a single platform everyone used and fit their needs. ...

April 9, 2026 · 2 min · eshanks

Woof - Replaced by AI

We’ve now reached the era where our jobs might be replaced by artificial intelligence. None of us are really immune to the impacts that AI will have on our jobs but I wasn’t expecting it to hit my household quite so soon. No, it wasn’t my tech job that was replaced … yet. It wasn’t even my wife’s job, but instead it was my dog Charlie’s career that was impacted. ...

April 5, 2026 · 4 min · eshanks

Brix Pizza - A Demo App

Over the past several years, I worked in marketing and spent a lot of time trying to make technical demos more compelling. The goal was always to demonstrate a capability or product feature, but there’s no reason a demo can’t also be fun, memorable, and grounded in reality. “Hello World” gets the job done, but it doesn’t feel real. It doesn’t resemble how applications are actually built, deployed, or operated. And because of that, it’s easy to forget. ...

December 23, 2025 · 3 min · eshanks

The Power of a Blameless Culture

Today marks the beginning of the 2024 Formula 1 season, a notable day for my mental well-being as it begins the end of a long, cold winter. The winter months often challenge me, limiting my time outdoors and casting shadows over my daily routines. The start of the Formula 1 season provides a needed distraction and spark of excitement as I look forward to warmer weather. My interest in Formula 1 was ignited by the popular Netflix series, " Drive to Survive." Although new to the sport, I quickly became engrossed, but I initially found myself without a team to support. Over time, the Mercedes Formula 1 team stood out, embodying values I’ve always respected. ...

March 1, 2024 · 3 min · eshanks

Harvester and IPMI Integration

Maybe it’s bougie, but one of the reasons I purchased E200-8d Supermicro Servers for my home lab was because they had IPMI built into them. Being able to remote into my lab at night when I’m messing around with different configurations was a nice to have. When I was consulting and traveling a lot, being able to remotely start my servers up was really important. I tested out things many times in my lab so that customers wouldn’t have to spend time figuring it out themselves. Anyway, the point is I bought servers with IPMI in them because I thought it was important. ...

March 1, 2024 · 4 min · eshanks