What to do in the face of inevitability? Well I find the best approach is always to just accept things and go with the flow as much as you can allow without deviating too much from your identity. Maybe incorporate it into your identity if you can.

Agent Smith

The thing I am now seeing spreading like Agent Smith in the Matrix are two things. The first one feels like what Elon Musk was referring to, what I mentioned here, which is a virus of the mind, an idea, an ideology, a misconception, a misguided projection, an infallible yet wrong conclusion. It is sweeping the social media feeds and what it accomplishes is polarising the different fields across IT. From cybersecurity to DevOps to backend to frontend to every corner. The polarisation is on what language to use in tech jargon from now on. The thing is, I wrote about it too, as a proponent to this change and now I will say something contradictory. Well seemingly so, I can also side with the ones that are for changing the jargon. The thing is, I do not mind as long as the amount of information is not lost.

Going from blacklist/whitelist to denylist/allowlist, is perfectly fine. We do not lose any information. It is clear what it is about and what it does and for some might even be easier to reason about. I am against blocklist as is proposed and used by Google. Not just because Google suggested it, but I find the word block ambiguous. It could also be a list of blocks that do something, are part of a process, or part of a modeled protocol and therefor does not convey the same immediate association as the word deny.

Black and white make grey

What I would call for is to exercise some kindness and understanding and basically meet each other in the middle. No black, no white but the lovely grey area in the middle. Where everything is possible and nothing is excluded. Try to use some empathy and see things from the other perspective. Just at least try.

Kubernetes

The second thing to be spreading like Agent Smith is this thing called Kubernetes that rears its ugly head like a hydra wherever I look these days. It would be a Herculean task indeed to slay this thing. So I make my peace with it and just try to live alongside it from now on. I do not like it, I do not think it is a panacea at all. Do I have a alternative? Yes, don't use it.

In all seriousness, check if you actually need this level of magnitude for your operation. Kubernetes is a big thing to use, it is a complex tool so it will exponentially add complexity to your setup. If you can do without it would be better. Contrived example you ask? Let us say you have a simple PHP site. What does it need? Well a database would be nice, a webserver to serve the content/execute the PHP script and that is about it. In the simplest case we just get a RaspberryPi or old PC and install a webserver on it and the database we want to use and hook it up so people can reach it from behind our domestic router. The slightly better solution that most people would go for is a simple server for the webserver part of it and another one for the database one.

In the case of Kubernetes, this solution would need a bunch of hardware to run, some service configuration, some loadbalancers, some docker containers which implicitly mean docker images and maybe some role based access management inside it to make everything connect correctly. Not to mention just learning the tool itself. You can see that on the logarithmic scale the Kubernetes scores insanely higher than the RaspberryPi solution. However both the old PC and RaspberryPi do not differ that much from the webserver solution other than where you run the software.

TLDR;

For anyone reading this and thinking why do they not put this at the beginning, I agree. This is just here to troll a little. It is Friday when I write this and I want weekend so I am in a slightly mischievous mood.

The takeaway should be though, be kind and understanding. Employ a little empathy next time, at least try to see the other perspective. Hope you have a great continuation of your life after this.

#devlife