TSR Community Hangout August 2025
Every month, the members of The Server Room, my DevOps community of practice, meet online for a casual video chat, the TSR Community Hangout.
TSR Community Hangout July 2025
Members of The Server Room, my DevOps community of practice, meet every month for a casual video chat, the TSR Community Hangout. Our July Hangout will be a week later than usual, on July 15th. The time’s the same, 20:00 Irish time (19:00 UTC).
Linux Shell for Beginners: The ls command
Hello DevOps friends! In this tutorial, we’re going to take a look at the ls command. There is no Unix or Linux user who doesn’t use it on a daily basis, so I’ll teach you what you need to know. The ls command is how you see what’s on your Linux disks. Type ls in…
A community that becomes your cohort of mentors
While traditional mentorship has its value, sometimes a group of helpful peers can be a great way to grow. The Server Room is such a community.
Self-Hosting Web Applications Using Podman
Container-based deployment is a neat way to self-host an application. However, I always try not to go overboard with complexity. That’s why I won’t immediately join the chorus of Kubernetes disciples when members of my DevOps community ask me how to deploy container workloads. Searching for viable alternatives, I recently explored the much simpler alternative…
If you’re a bad at management, don’t blame remote work
This article is a rant triggered by an inane argument made by Eric Schmidt, who blamed remote work for what’s clearly management failure.
When is it recommended to adopt a new DevOps tool?
In this article, I discuss the pros and cons of checking out and maybe adopting new DevOps tools, even though the ones we have are still doing their job.
Always update the BIOS first
Today, I spent hours trying to install Bluefin on an older laptop. The process always failed with Failed to write boot loader configuration. I tried vanilla Fedora Silverblue and ended up with the same disappointing result. Following a tip I found on the Bluefin Discord, I finally tried installing Fedora Workstation, and was able to…
A rocky but encouraging start with Rails credentials
For the biggest part of this week, I’ve been working on upgrading the Rails versions of our managed hosting dashboard application. I started with Rails 6.0, and now I’m at Rails 7.1. Today, I struggled for a long time with deploying to the staging instance on Heroku. At the centre of my issues was that…