Forem: Joe Hobot

Bilingual Devs What Language Are You Thinking in?

Joe Hobot — Sun, 24 May 2020 13:50:29 +0000

I speak 5 languages fluently and often I get asked what language I am thinking in. Been in the states for 20 years I can say that most of my thinking is in English however from time to time I catch my self thinking in different languages even when I am working on some project.

How about you ?

Creating K8s Namespaces and Protecting Resources

Joe Hobot — Mon, 20 Apr 2020 16:07:09 +0000

As of this whole mess with Corona Virus I decided to make at least one or two videos a week mostly around Kubernetes. There is bunch of videos that ill publish in coming weeks.

For today I published a video on how to create a namespace and also how to protect the resources from getting bogged down by deployments utilizing ResourceQuota. Enjoy and hope you like videos. Please do let me know if you have questions or want me to do a educational video on some other topics.

Christmas is around the corner. Build something for Someone

Joe Hobot — Thu, 12 Dec 2019 20:19:17 +0000

Hey its time of a year where people exchange gifts and some put those gifts under the tree. Last year I wrote an article about Christmas ideas that you could actually build vs buy at the store, wrap it and put under the tree.

Here is the link for those that are interested.

Simple Christmas Gift Ideas Using Your Skills

Joe Hobot ・ Nov 9 '18 ・ 2 min read

#productivity #discuss

Few things that might also work and put under the Christmas tree.

Smart Mirror is something I built and its much appreciated gift which for someone non-technical is like WOW factor but to some of us is just 5hrs of code and 10hrs of constructing that mirror + the material such as Raspberry PI + monitor + two way glass etc.

Cost is about $100-200 + your time

Echo with Alexa - this is something super fast that can be done within a day, granted you could go and buy echo dot for $29 but you could build one with Raspberry PI and add some extra stuff onto it.

Cost is about $35 + your time

My Favorite Cheat Sheet Plugin

Joe Hobot — Thu, 06 Jun 2019 13:54:12 +0000

I am more of a keyboard shortcut junky when it comes to any application.

Not only do I like keyboard shortcuts, I also have around 900 aliases for various things I do but mostly Kubernetes.

Years ago I stumbled upon a tool that was a game changer for me, and while there might be many, the one below is really my favorite because almost every application I use, I can find a keyword shortcut in matter of 1 second or in my case holding down the [Command] key.

CheatSheet in my opinion is a must for Dev/Ops people.

What are some of your cheetsheet programs?

Please share your experience as to how you utilize or get around all the keyboard shortcuts?

Lets Talk About Logs

Joe Hobot — Tue, 28 May 2019 22:56:31 +0000

Here are few things you could share and or discuss.

What kind of logs do you spit out (INFO , ERROR only)?

Are all your logs worth consuming and if so, why?

What are some success stories you have about logging?

Example: An app was spitting out 5gb of worthless logs, you code it in a way that it only produced what is really important.

What are some cool things you can do with logs you get from xyz resource?

Example: Your logs are some metrics, and you created an outlier where if threshold hits 10% than from previous hour?

Kubernetes CLI Tools I Use (Video)

Joe Hobot — Tue, 07 May 2019 16:23:35 +0000

Not too long ago I started 'kubernetes' video resource channel where I share some of the things I learned or want to share with larger k8s audience. In one of the videos I explained few tools that really helped me utalize CLI better when I started with k8s, and some of those cli tools is what I use even 2y later such as stern or kubectx and kubens.

Let me know what should be my next video about as I am going to start doing those again as time allows.

I am DevOps Engineer Working With K8s A Lot, Ask Me Anything!

Joe Hobot — Fri, 03 May 2019 15:44:31 +0000

I will try to answer most of your questions around DevOps or Kubernetes - Been now working on K8s for almost 2 years and have nothing but love for it.

Creating or Deleting GitHub Repos With Terraform

Joe Hobot — Tue, 30 Apr 2019 14:02:48 +0000

Just saw on twitter some tweet regards to site that helps you remove multiple github. While that's all fine and dandy, I really do not trust giving other sites permissions to my org or any type of API access even to my personal github account.

Now remember, to use terraform github provider you will need to have an org, otherwise it does not work with regular users.

I've been using terraform for almost any infrastructure orchestration and that includes anything that goes along with GitHub permissions,repos,users,orgs etc... because managing repos and performing some type of auditing with checks and balances can get messy.

Here is super easy way to manage your GitHub repos. I won't go too deep into setting up variables, but you can check GitHub Provider for more info.

First you will need a token and then create a provider, so create file provider.tf

provider "github" {
  token        = "YourTokenGoesHere"
  organization = "YourOrg"
}

Next , create a file that will hold your repos and collaborators.

resource "github_repository" "mynewrepo-repo" {
  name        = "mynewrepo-repo"
  description = "Sweet Terraform Repo Yey..."
}

resource "github_repository_collaborator" "a_repo_collaborator" {
  repository = "mynewrepo-repo"
  username   = "wow-much-love$$"
  permission = "admin"
}

Run these commands...

First you need to initialize terraform,so you get the modules etc.

terraform init

Once you are done with initialization , run a terraform plan, to see what will terraform do for you before you apply the changes.

terraform plan

Should look something like this

  + github_repository.mynewrepo-repo
      id:                 <computed>
      allow_merge_commit: "true"
      allow_rebase_merge: "true"
      allow_squash_merge: "true"
      archived:           "false"
      default_branch:     <computed>
      description:        "Sweet Terraform Repo Yey..."
      etag:               <computed>
      full_name:          <computed>
      git_clone_url:      <computed>
      html_url:           <computed>
      http_clone_url:     <computed>
      name:               "mynewrepo-repo"
      ssh_clone_url:      <computed>
      svn_url:            <computed>

  + github_repository_collaborator.a_repo_collaborator
      id:                 <computed>
      permission:         "admin"
      repository:         "mynewrepo-repo"
      username:           "wow-much-love$$"
Plan: 2 to add, 0 to change, 0 to destroy.

And if you are happy with outcome above, and you do not have anything like DESTROY or CHANGE. Feel free to run

terraform apply

Within few seconds you should see your new repo in your org.

Now this is super dirty and quick way of creating repos and adding a collaborator.

However, in real world you would create teams and you would add users to that team membership and then you would add the team to the repositories and if you have repos already, you would definitely first import them.

Oh and to remove the repo that you created via terraform, just remove repo and collaborator from step above and that should be it.

As mentioned, this is really quick of start creating github repos. It should not take you more than 15 minutes to set this all up.

SEO Does Not Matter to Grow Organic Traffic

Joe Hobot — Tue, 12 Mar 2019 13:12:46 +0000

Back in the day when I used to own blogs and websites (before I sold them), SEO was much easier than what it requires you to do now in order to rank better in search engines.

Back in 2006 your focus for better SEO was to include great description, about 300 words content and ensure that you mention the keyword a few times, oh and keyword based domain would be an 🍒on top.

That alone could get you ranked No.1 spot on Google.

When everyone figured that out, blogosphere what they called it was a spamsphere of posts with shi*ty content. You would search for something and it would be a useless article.

Then somewhere back in 2007 or around that time, most search engines switched their algorithm to rank sites per quality and authority.

That concept has not changed much except that now you have to also tell search engines what type of content it is.

So from an experienced guy who owned blogs with millions of views, none of SEO really matters, you might gain few hundred or thousand of organic traffic a month but if your content has no quality, those thousands of visitors will not:

Tweet Your Content
Bookmark Your Website (yes ppl still do that)
Remember You or Your Domain Name(Startup)
Link to your website.

When you are starting up, make sure that few SEO points are correct but don't go overboard with creating authority because you are not going to get one unless you have quality content, makes sense right?

Why would I link back and send you 10K visitors to your website and give you juicy backlink if you have a half as﹩ed articles that have no value to my visitors?

Typically if I would start a website of some sorts, here are few things I would personally focus on, please comment below and add some of yours.

Logo - needs to be clean
Website Title and Description has to be good and on point. (When I search for your website and it just says "Website Name" I probably am not going to click on your website, i'll go and click on one that says "Website Name - We solve problem xyz with xyz product"
Website design needs to be clean same colors on every page
Blog link - Got to have a blog if you want to create organic traffic no matter what referrals you want to see on your site.
Blog posts - I would post at least 1 article a week, now you might think that's not much, but 2000 word article with great flow, custom or amazing pictures and grammar is on point - yeah that's not going to happen in 30 minutes nor it will happen in 2hrs, it would take you at least 5hrs and because its 5hrs long, you might split that into 2-3 days so you can rest and do some other shi* like vacuum your house, or play with your kids 😂.

Conclusion: I wrote this super fast and it probably has valid points, now if I really took 2-3hrs to write this post I would've provided you better grammar, amazing pictures, the flow would be flawless and I would have gotten probably more traction.

Content quality matters, in order for you to gain some traffic and authority you need organic traffic that will come from social media sites and I am not talking about Twitter or Facebook only. Forums, community sites, video games, chatrooms etc, those are all great exposure signals + when you get juicy links from such sites, your authority is going to grow... The more authority you gain through the quality of content, the SEO is going to be great and therefore you will rank better for xyz keywords than your competitors.

Or scratch all what you just read, go with the get rich quick type of mentality and read black hat posts :)

How I Get Website [Wordpress] Layout Idea

Joe Hobot — Thu, 21 Feb 2019 03:40:16 +0000

I am doing some wordpress design for my own website and want to really make it look nice with some flow. Being a DevOps does not mean I am also a super web geek marketer that looks for weather the buttons are this green or that green color.

What I do care about is that my site loads under 2 seconds and has Google Score above 91 (currently sitting at 94).

This is what I do, I go to pintrest, which I always believed to be more for fashionistas and etsy people however upon looking for that one specific type of template I landed on pintrest the other day and found out there is thousands of templates I can look through.

Just look at this sh**! Elementor Templates

Ok so next just search for red wordpress themes :) ..

Another site I went to is the 99designs , if you must find this contests link, just scroll all the way at the bottom and click Design Contests on there you will find all kind of stuff and mostly looks really cool.

So there you have it my Devs.

Btw my favorite wp speed template is Neve with image optimizer + Cloudflare DNS.

Oh and few more plugins.. which now that I think of, I should write a Dev Post about it!

Calico Helm Chart for Kubernetes

Joe Hobot — Mon, 18 Feb 2019 01:56:48 +0000

While ago I was looking for Calico helm chart and there were some deployment files floating around the web using kubectl etc, but I really like to automate things with press of a button. So here it is a Calico Helm Chart that needs some love in case you are into Kubernetes.

mrzobot / calico-helm-chart

Helm Chart for Calico

Calico Helm Chart

I took AWS/EKS Calico Installation file that you can find here https://docs.aws.amazon.com/eks/latest/userguide/calico.html and split it into few files that make up the whole Helm Chart.

I have not worked on creating values.yaml file and templating it much, so if you have suggestions or time, feel free to update it. I just used the helm chart to test few things with automated Deployment.

Installation

Clone this repository

and then run

helm install . --name=calico --namespace=kube-system

If you need to reference tiller, just add --tiller-namespace=NamespaceWhereTillerIsInstalled

Notes

This helm chart is really straight forward, however feel free to fork it or make changes. I'll see to make updates to values files and start disecting the yaml infrastructure within the template.

View on GitHub

Few Tips When You Are Building A Chat On Website

Joe Hobot — Sat, 09 Feb 2019 18:53:50 +0000

I just posted this on twitter and thought to provide some personal observation when I encounter a chat feature on some website.

// Detect dark theme var iframe = document.getElementById('tweet-1094300485727723521-356'); if (document.body.className.includes('dark-theme')) { iframe.src = "https://platform.twitter.com/embed/Tweet.html?id=1094300485727723521&theme=dark" }

I love using the chat feature on any site that it offers, because I just find it more personal and get my questions answered faster than calling or emailing.

A few days ago I had some questions for my bank, usually, I call them, however, this time I wanted to chat with them as I had some other work to do + the question was pretty generic.

Story: Popped open the chat, asked the questions and hit submit button. The next thing I know is that I was 6th in line with 12 minutes of wait time. So I set a reminder for 10 minutes. After 10 minutes I pop open separate little window and found out that the rep was asking me for response 5 minutes after I submitted my request.

Problem: I thought the chat had sound enabled or sound feature, meaning that when rep connects with your session and says "Hello" I get the sound on my laptop.

Solution: I think it's self-explanatory, enable the sound feature.

While ago, there were few sites I was on and encountered mildly infuriating issues.

Story: I was looking into this tech product, and wanted to know more about it. Saw in left corner a chat with "ONLINE" tag, so I thought to give it a try.

I put my name in, fake email (because I do not want to be subscribed to their mailing list) and I entered my question.

Hi, my name is Joe and I really like the demo that you have on the website, would you mind telling me how does product X integrate with product Z? ENTER

Right after I hit enter, it said:

Thank you for contacting our support, your ticket has been sent to our support team, one of our representatives will reach out to you via phone or email

Problem: Don't have a chat feature enabled if it serves a purpose just so you can get my email, phone or company I work for. If it says Online I expect that a representative on the other end will connect to the session and be able to answer my question right on the spot.

Solution: Either disable that chat future or tag it as OFFLINE when there is nobody to answer questions at that moment. If a site in the story above would have OFFLINE chat and said something like: Open ticket, you would get my Name and my Email address.

Story: "AI" Chatbots. And chats that for most questions lead you to call the company rep anyways.

Problem: It's not "AI" Chat, it is you who generated most F.A.Q, and provided answers to those quetions.

Solution: Either don't call it AI or add the ability to talk to a real person via chat.

I hope some of these stories I've encountered, help some of you to think about how your future or current clients think about chat experience.