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I passed the CKA exam in June 2026. This post shares what helped me prepare, plus a few exam-day habits that made the test easier. I am now officially recognised as a Certified Kubernetes Administrator! About the CKA Exam This Is a Practical Exam The CKA is a practical exam. You work on real Kubernetes clusters and solve real tasks. The advantage is that you can test your answers as you go. The questions are written clearly, and most of the time I knew whether my solution was working. ...

Incoming emails. Put rubbish bins outside. Pick up shirts from the laundry. And finally, prepare that report for the management meeting. The never-ending to-do list just keeps growing. Like a thrashing train, it builds momentum. The tasks themselves are not the problem. The problem is how to start those tasks. Because STARTING is the PROBLEM. Not doing, but starting. Procrastination Paradox Procrastination is a defensive mechanism. It is meant to protect us from negative emotions and discomfort. ...

$25 per PR seems like a lot - or is it just a start?* Anthropic named the price for PR review. It averages between $15-$25 per pull request. PR is a vague representation of unit of work: An entire new feature implemented with tests A bug fix A typo correction On one hand, in such a price model we want to get the most out of each PR = more changes = more lines of code = bigger batch size. ...

Over the weekend, I had fun with Codex 5.3. For a long time, I wanted to change the theme of my personal website. My website is built with Hugo. While there are plenty of themes, finding the perfect one is hard. So I figured, why not use AI to change the design of my website? And so I went. I described what I wanted to achieve: Modern design Fix the privacy bar Always show the top bar while scrolling Use Playwright to validate your changes - this allowed Codex to see the changes it was making Codex asked a few clarifying questions, and magic happened: ...

Sometimes the best way is to just get started - and we will start by spinning up your very first cluster. That’s correct - right on your laptop. Word of warning - some familiarity with CLI tools is greatly useful here. If you prefer video, I’ve got you covered What is Kubernetes? Kubernetes (often shortened to K8s) is a platform for running and managing your containerised applications (think Docker) at scale. ...

No one asks you to build it. But once you do, they won’t be able to live without it. These tools usually start as a side gig, something to address your own pain – and soon they become an essential part of team tooling. I’m talking about Internal Tooling. Think: – User creation. – Database provisioning. – Creating a Webapp deployment with NGINX for Kubernetes. Fun the first time. Total pain after 100th run. ...

We started working in IT as we prefer computers over people. Locking yourself in the basement and coding can get you only so far. The blessing of being isolated from your customers has a profound curse – you don’t know who your customers are. What are their problems? What do they like about your work? What do they hate about your work? The worst part – all the input you get, is received by and filtered to you by someone else. ...

So there’s this feature you want to close today, ideally before lunch. And you almost got it right—just a little tweak here and a line change there. Save. Commit. Push. Open PR. The PR gets merged, and another couple of minutes pass for deployment. 💥 Change doesn’t work. At this point, the cycle repeats itself – another fix follows another deployment, and every repetition drives you up the wall. Until the feature works end-to-end, eventually. ...

Can you recognise when you’re going through change? The third stage is the most difficult. Uniformed Optimism – The beginning, the new idea, and the goal: this is the moment when everything seems simple. At this point, you can only see positives and are unaware of the difficulties and sacrifices demanded by the task. “Let’s automate the user creation process, it will only take a few hours of work and a single script to execute!” ...

While working on projects, I mostly met two ways of organising teams. On one hand, the team has been established for the sole purpose of delivering the project. On the other hand, the project was thrown into the already established team. And by no means is organising a successful team an easy task. Finding people with the right skills is one success. The other – how they go along with each other. ...