How My 15-Month-Old Baby Helped Me Pass the CKA Exam

Last November, I scheduled my CKA exam, but guess what? I kept putting it off for months. Every time I thought about studying Kubernetes, it felt like I was facing an enormous mountain I wasn’t ready to climb. Life got busy, I lost motivation, and the exam remained on hold. In July, I bought the KodeKloud CKA course, thinking it would push me to start studying. I studied a little, then stopped, and this cycle went on for weeks. Kubernetes seemed too big and complex to handle, and I didn’t know where to begin. And then, life happened—my father was hospitalized, and I had even less drive to study. ...

October 6, 2024 · 4 min · 835 words · Dan

SSL Pinning: Safeguarding Your App Against Man-in-the-Middle Attacks

In 2014, security researchers discovered a critical vulnerability in the HSBC mobile banking app for iOS. The app was found to be susceptible to man-in-the-middle (MITM) attacks, allowing attackers to intercept and manipulate sensitive financial information. The root of the problem? The absence of SSL pinning. Without SSL pinning, the app was vulnerable to accepting any SSL certificate, even a forged one, which enabled attackers to eavesdrop on the communication between the app and HSBC’s servers. This security flaw put users’ banking information at risk and highlighted a significant gap in the app’s security framework. ...

September 27, 2024 · 8 min · 1547 words · Dan

Kafka Explained: The Post Office of Modern Data Streaming

Joshua had been waiting anxiously for weeks. As an aspiring clerk, he knew that the government official’s appointment order could arrive any day. This appointment was crucial—it would determine his future and career. Every morning, Joshua checked his local post office, hoping that today would be the day the letter arrived, confirming his new position. In many ways, Joshua’s experience mirrors how Kafka, a powerful distributed streaming platform, manages and delivers data. Just like how Joshua relies on the postal system to receive his appointment letter, modern data systems depend on Kafka to ensure that critical information reaches its intended recipients quickly and reliably. ...

September 24, 2024 · 4 min · 748 words · Dan

How to Create a Self-Signed Certificate for IIS and Host a Website

A few weeks ago, I got a task from my manager that seemed straightforward at first: set up a development environment for one of our upcoming projects. The catch? It needed to be accessible over HTTPS, just like our production sites. Now, getting a certificate from a trusted Certificate Authority (CA) for a development environment didn’t make much sense, and we certainly didn’t want to incur extra costs or deal with the complexities of a CA for something internal. ...

September 19, 2024 · 5 min · 1048 words · Dan

Why YAML and How to Ace It?

I remember the first time I encountered YAML—it was during a seemingly regular workday when a Kubernetes task landed on my desk. I had been managing infrastructure the traditional way for years, but suddenly, here was this new ecosystem that used a format I hadn’t seen before: YAML. It was frustrating at first. The simple indentation of a line could break everything, and I was far too comfortable with JSON and XML. But as Kubernetes became indispensable, and Ansible, Docker Compose, and other tools followed suit, it became clear that YAML wasn’t just a passing trend—it was the new standard. ...

September 14, 2024 · 14 min · 2930 words · Dan