The Magic of Machine Learning

From an outsider’s perspective, machine learning looks like complete magic. I initially wanted to get a surface-level understanding of how it all works by watching a few Youtube videos on the topic but it was difficult to get even a blurry picture of what was going on without some hands-on learning. So I decided to watch a full class on Udemy instead. The result? I accidentally developed a major passion in machine learning (oops). So here’s a quick overview of my current adventures with Tensorflow as I attempt to put my current knowledge to use on Kaggle’s Titanic Competition

Beyond Ticketing: ServiceNow as Your Infrastructure Automation Hub

In the infrastructure engineering world, there are few things that elicit as many deep sighs as ServiceNow–second only to the coffee machine going down, maybe?

It’s often seen as a bloated platform used only for ticket management and the dreaded change request process. But, after more than nine years in infrastructure engineering across multiple enterprises, I’ve come to love and appreciate ServiceNow’s potential as a powerful automation hub. When properly leveraged, it transforms the cumbersome ticketing system into a robust platform for infrastructure orchestration, compliance automation, and self-service IT operations. Here’s how I’ve turned the platform everyone loves to hate into the backbone of an infrastructure automation strategy.

Things I just realized I’ve mostly forgotten about: Linux Networking

Trying to get two VPNs working together on the same Ubuntu system was a (relatively short) journey. I still know all the basics and whatnot, but I used to have all of the ifconfig commands memorized. Adding a default gateway, for example, used to be a common task for me back in the “old-school” days of being a Linux sysadmin. I had that command memorized. I knew how to read a route table! The move to Docker containers and AWS has rotted my brain. It’s also a testament to Docker that its networking Just Works in most cases. It’s also scary because running Docker on a system is dangerous since it, by default, modifies iptables to expose ports to the world (0.0.0.0). I wonder what other scary Docker things I’m missing as a result of forgetting how Linux Networking works.

vim Things to Remember

This is for vim stuff that I frequently have to Google for.

Copy output of shell command to file

This is done with:

:r !ls -1

Yanking and deleting properly

When trying to delete something and then paste, it’s best to use a dedicated register for yank instead:

"ay

and then paste with the register:

"ap

There’s also a separate register specifically for yanking:

"0p

Python things

Python is my main programming language.

Async/await

• How to use these
• How do they work under the hood
• How to mess this up badly

fastapi

• How to use this
• How it works under the hood
• How to mess up longin/security
• How to deploy this to Google Run with Cloud SQL, AWS EC2 with Aurora PSQL, IBM?
• How much more complicated does adding a proper SQL make this deployment, vs using SQLite
• Gitlab automatic deployment and unit testing with every commit

Distributed Systems

Reading this book, notes go here.