Ian Miell

Things I Wish I'd Known About Bash

Recently I wanted to deepen my understanding of bash by researching as much of it as possible. Because I felt bash is an often-used (and under-understood) technology, I ended up writing a book on it .

Key Git Concepts Explained the Hard Way

As an exercise, after finishing this article do the whole exercise again, but make a change to both origin/master and master and then do the fetch and merge to see what happens when a fast-forward is not possible.

The first non-bullshit book about culture I've read

I’ve always been frustrated that people often talk about culture without giving actionable or realistic advice, and was previously prompted by this tweet to write about what I did when put in charge of a broken team:

Ansible Techniques I Wish I’d Known Earlier

If you’ve ever spent ages waiting for an Ansible playbook to get through a bunch of tasks so yours can be tested, then this article is for you.

Git log – The good parts

If you’re managing a complex git codebase with multiple developers, then you may well be using a tool like GitHub or BitBucket to delve into the history and figure out branch and merge issues.

Strace – My Favourite Secret Weapon (2011)

I’m often asked in my technical troubleshooting job to solve problems that development teams can’t solve. Usually these do not involve knowledge of API calls or syntax, rather some kind of insight into what the right tool to use is, and why and how to use it. Probably because they’re not taught in college, developers…

Things I Wish I'd Known Before Using Vagrant

One of the ironies of working a lot with Docker, Kubernetes, and OpenShift is that I’ve had to learn a lot about Vagrant and Virtualbox. Mostly I use it to spin up OpenShift clusters on my local machine, but I’ve had to poke into lots of corners to get various other things working too.

If you want to transform IT, start with finance

When talking about IT transformation, we often we often talk about ‘culture’ being the problem in making change, but why stop there?

Why Are Enterprises So Slow?

How and why I run my own DNS servers

Despite my woeful knowledge of networking, I run my own DNS servers on my own websites run from home.

It’s great to be a consultant

I spent 20 years slaving away at companies doing development, maintenance, troubleshooting, architecture, management, and whatever else needed doing. For all those years I was a permanent hire, working on technology from within.

“Who Should Write the Terraform?”

Working in Cloud Native consulting , I’m often asked about who should do various bits of ‘the platform work ‘.

My 20-Year Experience of Software Development Methodologies

‘The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.’ F. Scott Fitzgerald

‘AWS vs. K8s’ Is the New ‘Windows vs. Linux’

If, like me, you’re over 40 and work in IT, you’ll probably remember a time when everyone used Windows, and a small but growing proportion of people were wasting their lives compiling Linux in their spare time.

Surprising Bash Variables

Continuing in the series of posts about lesser-known bash features , here I take you through seven variables that bash makes available that you may not have known about.

When Should I Interrupt Someone?

How many times have you sat there trying to work through a technical problem, and thought:

Anatomy of a Linux DNS Lookup

Since I work a lot with clustered VMs , I’ve ended up spending a lot of time trying to figure out how DNS lookups work. I applied ‘fixes’ to my problems from StackOverflow without really understanding why they work (or don’t work) for some time.

Goodbye Docker: Purging Is Such Sweet Sorrow

This was triggered by a recurring incident I faced where the Docker daemon was using 100% CPU on multiple cores that made the host effectively unusable.

More Things I Wish I’d Known About Bash

My previous post took off far more than I expected, so I thought I’d write another piece on less well-known bash features.

Practical Shell Patterns I Use

Over the decades I’ve been using the shell, there are thousands of reusable patterns I’ve picked up from looking over others’ shoulders and googling.

What I learned using private LLMs to write an undergraduate history essay

I used private and public LLMs to answer an undergraduate essay question I spent a week working on nearly 30 years ago, in an effort to see how the experience would have changed in that time. There were two rules:

Unprivileged Docker Builds – A Proof of Concept

I work at a very ‘locked-down’ enterprise, where direct access to Docker is effectively verboten.

Things I Learned Managing Site Reliability (2017)

For several years I managed the 3rd line site reliability operation for many of the world’s busiest gambling sites, working for a little-known company that built and ran the core backend online software for several businesses that each at peak could take tens of millions of pounds in revenue per hour. I left a couple…

Anatomy of a DNS Lookup – Part II

and determined that most programs reference /etc/resolv.conf along the way to figuring out which DNS server to look up.

The Astonishing Prescience of Nam June Paik

I hadn’t heard of Nam June Paik until I went to his exhibition at Tate Modern a few weeks ago.