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After a long break from posting on this blog, I'm happy to share the continuation of the iximiuz Labs story. This time, I'm going to cover the recent overhaul of the playground engine, which I like to call Playgrounds 2.0:

• Quick recap: iximiuz Labs playgrounds - what are they, really?
• How VMs are constructed by mixing the rootfs and the kernel
• How to run custom playgrounds with simple YAML manifests
• How to bake and use custom VM rootfs images
• How to create multi-network playgrounds
• Why you should start creating Linux playgrounds today

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The recent post by DHH regarding their decision to drop TypeScript support in Turbo 8 has suddenly made everyone eager to express their opinion on the TypeScript vs. JavaScript dilemma, and I'm no exception. Hell, I don't even know what Turbo 8 is, but I feel like I have something to share too. Just a few weeks ago I migrated one of my two biggest projects to TypeScript while keeping the other one using JavaScript, and this is exactly how I like it to be, for now.

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Today, I came across a true gem: Akin's Laws of Spacecraft Design. Originally written for the aerospace engineering domain. I find many parts of it relevant for software engineers as well. Below, I share my thoughts on the Laws that resonate most with my experience as a software designer and tech blogger.

As it often happens, I discovered it through Matt Rickard's newsletter.

What DALL-E thinks the image for this blog post should look like.

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This is a long overdue post on iximiuz Labs' internal kitchen. It'll cover why I decided to build my own learning-by-doing platform for DevOps, SRE, and Platform engineers, how I designed it, what technology stack chose, and how various components of the platform were implemented. It'll also touch on some of the trade-offs that I had to make along the way and highlight the most interesting parts of the platform's architecture. In the end, I'll, of course, share my thoughts on what's next on the roadmap. Sounds interesting? Then brace for a long read!

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Many of us these days seem to be in pursuit of better container images. And this is for good reasons! Bloated images with many (potentially unneeded) moving parts slow down development and give more space for a CVE to sneak in. Luckily, there is a number of ways to produce slim and secure images, and everyone just needs to pick their poison a suitable one. But before doing so, it's good to become aware of a potential dissonance between what we say is important for us (securing our software supply chains) and what may actually drive our decisions (keeping out dev loops fast).

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