Bridging fault domains

A fault domain (or failure domain) is essentially a set of resources, or components that share a common point of failure. One example of this is an Azure Availability Zone, or your own single Data Center. Typical points of failure for a fault domain are power (with no backup generator), or cooling, or a datacenter is served by a single network connection. The term “fault domain” could theoretically be applied to smaller areas of an application architecture, like a single network, or a rack of servers, but this article considers a fault domain more from a cloud architecture definition.

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Freedom from Google Photos: taking 18 years and 80gb out of the cloud

Google Photos, the free, easy to use, on-for-many-android-users service has been the single Photo backup strategy for many of those who have used it, since it was released in 2015. I, for one, was amazed to discover that I have uploaded photos dating as far back as 2005, totalling over 80Gb. Initially, Google photos seemed like that ultimate, hassle-free, cloud backup service that would never be replaced…. However, as time went on, I found myself growing increasingly concern about cloud services that “own” my personal data.

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GitHub may replace DockerHub

It’s been interesting to witness the meteoric rise of “Docker” over the years, and it is undoubted that the technology that was pioneered and popularized by Docker (more correctly called “Linux Containers”), is here to stay for the long run. The rise of the technology was partially due to the ease of publishing containers, enabled by free DockerHub service. However, in this article, I propose that DockerHub as a single repository of container images is becoming less and less important than it once was, and in it’s place, GitHub is a strong contender to take over as the 1 repository for containers — as it has its sights on being everything a developer needs.

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Use Firefox as a universal web chat app

Chat that is always compatible, updated, and integrates with browser extensions. Too many chat apps — can’t change that. The amount of chat applications and protocols out there now-a-days is getting absolutely crazy. It’s like in the 1990s, when we had ICQ, AIM, IRC, and others. For a little while, I felt like things were getting better — I got down to just 2 chat apps!… Fast-forward to today — the chat apps I need are unfortunately even more than in the 90s.

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How to properly archive a project

The TURTLES model. How many times have you seen projects abandoned on GitHub, or internal Wikis, with no explanation, no “next steps”, no follow-up or notes? How many hundreds of hours were lost to that project, and what was learned? This article proposes a model (“TURTLES”), or more simply, a checklist, of how to properly archive a project. Is now the right time to archive this project? T — Technologists: Do enough people contribute to maintaining this project?

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Speed up your command line navigation

Speed up your command line navigation Photo by Kevin Ku from Pexels Knowing a few key shortcuts can have a surprising impact. As someone who sits frequently with others over a command line to help debug code and navigate servers, it’s easy to become frustrated on their behalf at how cumbersome things can be when you may not know time-saving shortcuts. Here are some essential shortcuts and key tips to help you speed up your command line usage.

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My first experiences using MacOS

This article was written after 24 hours with a Mac Mini, i5 CPU, 8GB RAM, 1TB HDD. Mac OS Catalina. My own Monitor, Mouse, Keyboard. What am I used to? Been using Linux (Fedora, KDE) as my “daily desktop” for a longgg time now and 200% happy with it. It’s just perfect for me. Windows. Have used everything Windows 95 up until Windows Vista as a “daily desktop”, then I switched to Linux.

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