Blog - BrettOps

Confessions of a document generator

Brett Weir • 6 min read

May 1, 2023 — A tale of how easily a project can be derailed by attempting to automate things that maybe don't need to be automated.

Building a static site with Eleventy and Tailwind

Brett Weir and Claire Nguyen • 14 min read

Apr 17, 2023 — Eleventy and Tailwind are two popular tools for front end development, but making them work together is non-obvious. We'll explore these tools for the first time and work on getting them to play nicely together.

Crossing the uncanny valley

Brett Weir • 10 min read

Apr 3, 2023 — Lately, I've been feeling a lot of anxiety about my role in the post-AI future. Without many answers, I decided to see what ChatGPT had to say.

Installing things with style

Brett Weir • 8 min read

Mar 27, 2023 — The install command is profoundly useful and profoundly underrated. Learn how this tiny unassuming command can save a ton of scripting and make your installations cleaner and more robust.

How to remove Rook from a Kubernetes cluster

Brett Weir • 5 min read

Mar 20, 2023 — If you're installing Rook for the first time, it'll probably take a few tries, but fully removing it from your cluster is more difficult than it looks. We'll walk through a simple procedure to restore your cluster to a Rook-free state.

All the ways to write a string in YAML

Brett Weir • 6 min read • Part of the YAML survival guide series

Mar 13, 2023 — There are multiple ways to represent a string in YAML, but it's not easy to know why you'd choose one over another. Here's a primer on YAML string syntax and why and when to use each one.

The apt sandwich

Brett Weir • 5 min read • Part of the Dockerfile idioms series

Mar 2, 2023 — Learn how to make your Debian-based containers dramatically smaller without having to switch to another base image.

Schedule GitLab CI/CD pipelines with Terraform

Brett Weir • 24 min read

Feb 27, 2023 — You run a pipeline on every commit, right? But what if you haven't committed in awhile? In this article, we'll automate a weekly pipeline schedule to exercise all projects, active or not.

Transfer files with ssh

Brett Weir • 14 min read

Feb 20, 2023 — Unix tools are designed to be useful in new ways that tool authors don't anticipate. In this article, we'll use ssh to re-create the functionality of scp.

Write great command line utilities with Python

Brett Weir • 18 min read

Feb 13, 2023 — Learn how to create simple, standalone, useful Python CLI tools to solve even the most mundane infrastructure problems, so that you can start automating everything.