Blog
Learn Python Quickref
Photo by Brecht Corbeel on Unsplash This is my fairly opinionated quick reference on how to learn Python. This isn’t so much a guide as it is something to launch from. There are already plenty of guides. I’m writing this with the novice in mind, but the seasoned programming veteran may derive something useful here.
December 28, 2025
Technical Learning
Photo by Nick Morrison on Unsplash Technical LearningI’ve always been interested in what I like to call meta-learning or ways that I can be a more effective learner. This goes all the way back to my school days and I remember learning about ways that drawing mind-maps was more effective for visual learning and that da Vinci kept notebooks, and so I started doing that too. I started trying to capture notes in these tree-like mind-maps. I kept moleskine notebooks for years. I also read a book on speed reading, but I must confess even after lots of practice I was never very good at it. Maybe I just didn’t get it, but it felt like just glorified skimming to me. But I did pick up some habits around getting a sense of the overall structure of a book or chapter and making multiple passes at the information each with a different purpose. For technical learning I very rarely read every word on the page.
September 7, 2025
RHEL 9 kmod-kvdo bug
The kmod-kvdo module is used to enable VDO in kernel usespace. On RHEL it’s primarily used to thin provision logical volumes with LVM. See the links below. Useful links Upstream open source dmo-vdo/kvdo project. RHEL 9 Introduction to VDO on LVM Install & enable kvdo Install kmod-kvdo:
August 2, 2025
Local Development Testing with RHEL and Vagrant
Sometimes I need to be able to spin up a Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) server in a local development environment for testing. For many use-cases spinning up a free Rocky Linux image is sufficient to test in an environment that’s a relatively close facsimile to a RHEL-proper environment. But for those cases where you can’t get around needing to test in a RHEL environment then there’s a need for a RHEL image with a subscription attached. Red Hat’s Developer licenses are good here, with the ability to have up to 16 systems for developer testing. More on this later…
October 10, 2024
My Personal Knowledge Base (aka "Second Brain")
Photo by Jan Kahánek on Unsplash I’m a religious note-taker. Back in my school days, I kept lots of notebooks and I had a habit of always carrying around a Moleskine and jotting down ideas, writing notes, or journaling. Now many years later I’ve developed a habit of writing my notes in digital form. Mostly this was so that I could make them searchable. At first, my notes started out as a few text files but eventually, I started writing all of my notes in Markdown . They’re still text files, but Markdown is an easy-to-read and easy-to-write markup that renders nicely to HTML.
November 9, 2023
On Learning Ansible
Photo by Jonathan Chng on Unsplash I recently had someone reach out to me on LinkedIn asking if I would mentor them on Ansible. Like many sysadmins I know I’m short on bandwidth and regretfully had to decline. But I did offer a book recommendation and a link to the Ansible Discord I sometimes frequent…
November 8, 2023
DevOps Learning Resources
Updated 2023-09-16 This is a collection of recommended DevOps learning resources. Those with a ✅ green check-mark are my favorite resources for those topics. DevOpsOnline resources DevOps Roadmap SRE Books – Google Getting into DevOps – Reddit Books ✅ The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win by Gene Kim The Unicorn Project: A Novel about Digital Disruption, Developers, and Overthrowing the Ancient Powerful Order by Gene Kim The DevOps Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, & Security in Technology Organizations by Gene Kim, et al. Cloud NativeAWS Hands-On AWS Troubleshooting - A Cloud Guru Azure GCP VirtualizationContainerization Docker CLI Cheat Sheet - Docker Docker Mastery - Udemy Docker Deep Dive by Nigel Poulton Orchestration Kubernetes ✅ The Kubernetes Book by Nigel Poulton Kubernetes The Hard Way - Free Tutorial KodeKloud.com - Learn-by-doing Platform Kubectl cheat sheet - Kubernetes AutomationCI/CD Continuous Integration Continuous Deployment
September 4, 2023
How I Became a Linux Sysadmin in Less Than 2 Years
In November of 2019, I started working as a Tier 1 support agent at a web-hosting company in the Denver, CO area. Just shy of 18 months later I was promoted to Managed Hosting Analyst, which is a Linux Sysadmin role. I retained a couple roles between then. I was promoted to Tier 1 Expert at about 3 months in, and around 9 months later I received a promotion to Advanced Product Support, which is basically a Jr. Linux Sysadmin role. On average I received a promotion around every 6 months.
May 20, 2021
Grit
I recently learned that the greatest predictor of success in an endeavor is not anything you would typically think. It’s not IQ, socioeconomic status… whether you grew up rich or poor, or whether you had good parents. Actually, it’s a difficult to define quality called grit. To give an example, with enough grit you can overcome all odds and become a navy seal. Just take a look at David Goggins . I’m paraphrasing, but he came from a racist part of Alabama. He grew up poor. His father was abusive. He was overweight. He had just about every reason not to succeed. The one thing he did seem to have was grit. If anyone has grit, it’s this guy. He’s a certifiable badass. But he didn’t get there overnight.
May 16, 2021