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Now

This is a /now page — a snapshot of where my hours are actually going this month. It's deliberately narrow and short-lived. If you're reading this in a future quarter, it's already wrong.

Right now​

Across my Arctiq and INSPYR engagements, a few threads carry most of the week:

  • A self-service data and operations portal. Leading the build of an internal web app that lets developers query Azure SQL and MongoDB across environments without routing every request through a pipeline or the DevOps team — PII masked in production, gated by a one-click admin approval queue. The same app hands load-testing teams self-service Kubernetes operations: restart a workload, or change its requests, limits, or replica count, every action audited. The aim is to push the team from DevOps toward a real platform team.
  • SOC2 compliance and guardrails. Building compliance into delivery on the EKS platform — automated CI/CD checks, IaC policy, and merge-request gating in GitLab — plus Kubernetes LimitRanges to standardize resource governance across lower and production, with the architecture documented as code in D2.
  • AKS → Cilium migration. Still moving one of our environment clusters off the default CNI to Cilium. Eyes on policy parity, eBPF-side observability, and the cut-over plan.
  • Just wrapped. A week-long Azure enablement workshop I instructed for a client team — cloud fundamentals through governance, networking, compute, data and AI, and operations. I'd take another one.

Outside the day job, KodePull is closing its biggest engagement yet — a long-term build for a psychology-testing platform for athletes, with an integrated shop and results analysis. While that lands, the steady work is maintaining a handful of clients' personal-brand sites and their hosting.

This month
AKS
Cilium
Azure
D2
GitLab CI
WordPress
Cloudflare

Learning​

CKAD is done — passed in August at 98%, submitted with 48 minutes left. The prep that got me there — Mumshad Mannambeth's course, killer.sh, and my own simulator — is written up in the CKAD guide.

Next is CKA — step 3 on the Kubestronaut path. The administrator lens this time: cluster lifecycle, scheduling, storage, networking, troubleshooting — the surfaces CKAD treats as given. Two exams down, three to go: CKA, KCSA, CKS.

In progress
Kubernetes
Docker

Building​

Shipped: kubestronaut-sim. An open-source exam simulator for the Kubestronaut certifications — one command boots a real Kubernetes cluster on your machine, draws an exam from a pool of original questions, and grades on behavior: a NetworkPolicy that actually denies, an Ingress the controller really routes. KCNA and CKAD banks are live; CKA, KCSA, and CKS are scaffolded. It was my final gate before the real CKAD — the sim is deliberately harder, and the score gap proved it. The project page has the full story, and the bank format is documented so anyone can contribute questions.

Earlier this year: the RHCE lab and its guide — the guide and the lab: seven VMs, eighteen exam-style tasks, and a 300-point grader that scores you the way the real EX294 does.