A bundle of book bundles for you today. There were a couple of bundles released recently, so I just grouped them together.

1. ML/AI books by O'Reilly
2. Learn to program by Pearson
3. Cybersecurity and forensics by Pearson

Just keep in mind that often Humble Bundle shares reoccurring bundles. So, always check your library before the purchase :)

#books #ml #ai #security #programming

All talks today are about AI: models, agents, RAGs, MCPs, editors, etc.

In this article, Arseniy Zinchenko explains what is an MCP (model context protocol) with an example.

And in the follow-up article, he expands the example by writing a basic MCP for Victoria Logs.

BTW, if you're still not subscribed to his Substack, make sure to subscribe! Arseniy posts some great technical content there and makes it quite regularly.

#ai

A very nice overview (with examples) of Wardley maps & Pace Layering - methods that can help you building a technical strategy at your company, and reason about planning and budgeting.

#leadership #strategy

To analyze the data, one has to collect it first. So, I'd like to invite you to participate in two ongoing surveys:

- 2025 Stack Overflow Developer Survey - an annual survey from a very important (albeit not so popular anymore) engineering resource (in English).
- DOU Salary survey - an annual survey of the Ukrainian community (in Ukrainian).

#random

Figma runs in Kubernetes. How can I be sure? By reading their blog post How we migrated onto K8s in less than 12 months.

This blog post doesn't dive deep into technical details, but it provides a glimpse of what technologies are used by Figma to manage their infrastructure.

What I liked about this article is that they have "in less than 12 months" right in the title! I think, more articles should provide realistic timelines, especially when talking about production systems under load. "Kubernetes up & running in 30 minutes" have its own merit, but not in prod.

#kubernetes

This article is quite old, but it's interesting nonetheless, since it describes an approach rather than a specific technology.

Moreover, it describes a phenomenon that was identified long time ago. However, here Slack shows how they used it to adopt (or discard) software within the company. Sure, such an approach would work better in larger organizations, but it's still interesting to read about.

#culture

Yet another bundle of programming books on HumbleBundle. This one is from No Starch Press, who usually have good books.

#books

Who would win: a null pointer crash loop or a multi-billion dollar corporation?

And here we have a postmortem of the recent Google’s outage.

P.S. Kudos to Google for releasing this postmortem so quickly!

#postmortem

​​​​For today's Donations Monday, I want to share with you a fundraiser by DOU.ua.

They are raising 20M UAH (~€42k) for reconnaissance drones for the 3rd Assault Brigade.

Here's the direct link to the Monobank Jar:
https://send.monobank.ua/jar/AGK8qiQwQX

There is also a raffle for donations of more than 300UAH. If you know to know more about the raffle, as well as about the fundraiser itself, check out the dedicated page (information is in Ukrainian):
https://dou.ua/triyka/

#donations #Ukraine

I'm experimenting with the day of digest. So, here's the new issue:
https://newsletter.catops.dev/p/catops-digest-2025-06-17

#digest #newsletter

Apple has apparently realized that the big chunk of their customers are tech companies.

So, we are closer to get a native Linux container implementation, or rather the official implementation, in macOS 26 (Tahoe).

An interesting thing about this implementation is that instead of spinning a single big VM for all the containers, which is pretty much what all the existing implementations do; Apple chose to have micro-VMs for each container. In any case, I don't think this implementation detail would impact the UX a lot.

#apple #containers

A quick explainer for the caching strategies. It's concise, but it would be useful, if you're preparing for a system design interview, or thinking of implementing caching in your app.

#system_design

Time to update your passwords, or at least check if you've been pwned. Also, make sure to have MFA configured for your important accouts.

16 billion passwords exposed in record-breaking data breach, opening
access to Facebook, Google, Apple, and any other service imaginable

#security

Denys Vasyliev shares the challenges AI brings to contemporary SRE practices.

Not in terms of some autogenerated code breaking production, although that also happens, but in terms of how can we access the reliability of AI interfaces, and what the word “reliability” even means in the age of AI.

Also, make sure to subscribe to his Telegram channel (in Ukrainian), if you haven’t already.

#ai #sre

​​My friend is raising 300k UAH for a pickup truck for the 28th brigade.

Your help is greatly appreciated!

https://send.monobank.ua/jar/6dbYCchqSh

#donations #Ukraine

How We Load Test Argo CD at Scale: 1,000 vClusters with GitOps on Kubernetes.

An interesting benchmark of ArgoCD. While the setup is somewhat too specific (vCluster), this benchmark provides some insights into the limitations of ArgoCD at scale. There are also manifests available, so you can reproduce the experiment (using some YAML generation with Bash :D)

#kubernetes #gitops #argocd

Ktea - pronounced "K-tea" - is a TUI client for Kafka that allows you to see the topics and consumer groups, produce and consume messages, etc.

It's a bit rough and you may need to configure the Meta button for your terminal (can be a bit of a PITA on MacOS), but otherwise it may be useful!

Another way of working with Kafka in more or less visual way is kafka-ui from Provectus. It's a web GUI, but it can be spun up locally in Docker.

#kafka

​​​​For today’s Donations Monday, I’d like to remind you about the fundraiser that DOU has started for the 3rd Assault Brigade.

They are raising 20M UAH (~€410k) for reconnaissance drones for the 3rd Assault Brigade.

Here's the direct link to the Monobank Jar:
https://send.monobank.ua/jar/AGK8qiQwQX

There is also a raffle for donations of more than 300UAH. If you know to know more about the raffle, as well as about the fundraiser itself, check out the dedicated page (information is in Ukrainian):
https://dou.ua/triyka/

#donations #Ukraine

Under daily routine, it's easy sometimes to forget, why we've gotten into the industry in the first place.

This is where pet-projects come in handy. Also, they are great for learning! Unfortunately, the "pet-project" term got a commercialized a bit. However, this article gave me a new term - "toy software"! I'm gonna use it from now on.

There are a few examples of such toy software that the author wrote through the years. Almost all those examples look super-complex to me. However, one need to understand that each of us has different expertise, and thus different things look easy or hard to each of us. I can easily think of a couple of examples of such platform-related toy software one could build. For example, Cost Exporter really took maybe a week, if I don't account for all the procrastination time.

#programming

A new issue of the CatOps Newsletter is out!

https://newsletter.catops.dev/p/catops-digest-2025-07-03

#digest #newsletter

Security researches from WIZ have a fun capture the flag challenge for you!

It has monthly challenges and a leaderboard. Feel free to participate!

#security