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My 5th Year at GitLab: Developer Advocate Journey, AI Adventures, and Finding Balance

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My 5th Year at GitLab: Developer Advocate Journey, AI Adventures, and Finding Balance

Join me in my 5th year at GitLab - from ambitious Staff Developer Advocate promotion, leading AI initiatives, traveling Europe for events, and building meaningful connections. A story of growth, challenges, and the joy of working with a global remote team while staying true to personal passions.

Remote office upgrades 2024, part 2: Windows Gaming PC, KVM switch, 192 GB RAM for AI/LLMs

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Remote office upgrades 2024, part 2: Windows Gaming PC, KVM switch, 192 GB RAM for AI/LLMs

2024 brought a new 49" monitor for efficient work but also gaming experiences. Buying a gaming PC, connecting it to the environment with a KVM switch, and then reconsider the Windows setup for containers, VMs and AI/LLMs was a fun challenge.

Terminal on macOS, ansible-playbook run to upgrade Linux VMs, red error message

Ansible with ansible_python_interpreter on Ubuntu targets: /bin/sh: 1: /usr/bin/env python3: not found

After upgrading to Ansible in recent weeks, the playbook to upgrade my Linux VMs stopped working with a cryptic error message, /bin/sh: 1: /usr/bin/env python3: not found - Learn root cause analysis and how to fix the problem

Docker Compose with Ghost and MySQL 8.4, mysql_native_password startup errors - mitigation and solution

Docker Compose with Ghost and MySQL 8.4, mysql_native_password startup errors - mitigation and solution

An unplanned MySQL upgrade to 8.4 introduced startup errors, removed deprecated mysql_native_password auth method. This blog post looks into root cause, workaround mitigation, and solution with migrating to caching_sha2_password. When you read this, it worked.

Raspberry Pi 5 with 52Pi NVMe hat, Samsung 990 EVO SSD - faster for Ollama and LLMs?

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Raspberry Pi 5 with 52Pi NVMe hat, Samsung 990 EVO SSD - faster for Ollama and LLMs?

This blog post explains setting up a Raspberry Pi 5 with an NVMe SSD hat for better disk performance. The goal is to compare the benchmark with the SD card Pi, and test the performance impact on running LLMs with Ollama.

Remote workspace setup 4.0: Samsung Odyssey 49" monitor, Thunderbolt 4 dock, Elgato Prompter, Facecam Pro, Hue lighting

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Remote workspace setup 4.0: Samsung Odyssey 49" monitor, Thunderbolt 4 dock, Elgato Prompter, Facecam Pro, Hue lighting

After four years of all-remote work, I upgraded my remote workspace setup. This article describes the research and considerations for a bigger monitor, improved lighting, and video recording investments while maintaining an ergonomic and healthy remote workspace.

Raspberry Pi 5 setup with metal case active cooling and 7" touchscreen

Raspberry Pi 5 setup with metal case active cooling and 7" touchscreen

This blog post describes my learning journey with setting up a new Raspberry Pi 5 for future learning with local LLMs, Observability, CI/CD. It starts with hardware considerations and gets the minimum setup running with an SD card. Ultimately, the setup adds a metal case and touchscreen support.

Michi, Limited Edition - 4 years all-remote at GitLab

Michi, Limited Edition - 4 years all-remote at GitLab

It is rare that I feel that every year in my career brings me forward. 4 years in a row now at GitLab. New challenges, new growth, and new rewards. I feel more confident with my peers, gaining trust and building relationships. Technology and "I have no idea, how

GDPR compliant website analytics with Umami (incl. OpenTofu/Ansible in Hetzner Cloud setup)

GDPR compliant website analytics with Umami (incl. OpenTofu/Ansible in Hetzner Cloud setup)

Dive into Umami, an open-source and GDPR-compliant Google Analytics alternative, and explore web data analytics with dashboards and reports. A detailed setup guide with OpenTofu and Ansible in Hetzner Cloud is included for self-hosted environments.

Local Ollama running Mixtral LLM with LLamaIndex, loaded with personal tweet context

Local Ollama running Mixtral LLM with LLamaIndex, loaded with personal tweet context

Ollama allows to run large language models locally. I was excited to learn about Mixtral, an open model, now available through LLamaIndex with Ollama, explained in this blog tutorial. The example to load my own tweets to ask questions in this unique context is fascinating. After running Ollama, and using

There is no plan B

There is no plan B

I will always look back at moments like creating a website demo for an interview - a fresh mind, an opportunity to explore life, a challenge to tackle, requiring different and creative ideas.

Three years all-remote at GitLab: Know the unknown unknowns (growth, life, and work)

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Three years all-remote at GitLab: Know the unknown unknowns (growth, life, and work)

2023-03-02 marks my third year at GitLab. I have been very busy in 2022, did not stop much to reflect on great moments. This blog post is a summary, reflection, and shows my true vulnerable self. It may not be 100% applicable to your career aspirations or path to follow.

Docker CLI behind a Squid proxy

Docker CLI behind a Squid proxy

While helping analyse a problem with docker-machine behind an HTTP proxy, I figured that I have never setup a squid proxy with Docker myself, and wanted to see what I can learn.. Docker-machine docker errorHi Michi, I am not sure what you are asking for ie context/URL, I simply

My KubeCon EU experience: First time in person, meeting friends, and speaking

My KubeCon EU experience: First time in person, meeting friends, and speaking

KubeCon EU was special, for many reasons. One of them was to finally meet friends, old and new, for the first time ... or after a very long time. I'm as excited as 2 years ago when I joined @gitlab on March 2nd, 2020, onboarding month and ready to

Disable UFW BLOCK messages in syslog on Ubuntu

ufw a firewall on Ubuntu works great, except for logging too verbose into the syslog. $ less /var/log/syslog Jun 2 00:00:56 legendiary kernel: [147272.918975] [UFW BLOCK] IN=eth0 OUT= MAC=96:00:00:37:5b:55:d2:bc:7f:6e:34:e3:a3:00 SRC=197.

Ghost v5 upgrade with MySQL 8 collation migration, in Docker compose

Ghost v5 upgrade with MySQL 8 collation migration, in Docker compose

Ghost v5 has been released, the underlying stack for this website, running in containers. In this blog post, I'll look into the upgrade to the latest v4, MySQL8 collation changes, database migrations, and the final v5 upgrade. There are a few required steps for v5: * Upgrade to the

Docker Desktop alternatives on macOS: podman, nerdctl, Rancher Desktop

Docker Desktop alternatives on macOS: podman, nerdctl, Rancher Desktop

Docker changed its subscription model including Docker Desktop, thus generating more demand for alternatives. In this blog post, we look into podman, nerdctl, and Rancher Desktop as Docker Desktop alternatives on macOS. The Docker Desktop subscription changes [https://www.docker.com/blog/updating-product-subscriptions/] required a new agreement until January 31,

New ZSH theme on macOS: Powerlevel10k

New ZSH theme on macOS: Powerlevel10k

Terminal integrations and themes help with a clear UX, CLI command details, and information on the current versions, name, and path, for example showing the Git branch or not-committed changes. I have been using the Spaceship prompt [https://github.com/spaceship-prompt/spaceship-prompt] with Oh-My-ZSH for a while, but never really

2 years all-remote and my 2022 vision

2 years all-remote and my 2022 vision

Two years all-remote feels different throughout a pandemic and is nowhere near what I had planned. I needed to adjust to the situation and make it a different, challenging, yet exciting adventure. This blog post will focus on remote work, my challenges, growth, mistakes, and success. Let's start

Fedora 34: NVIDIA kernel module missing falling back to nouveau - GPU ignored

Fedora 34: NVIDIA kernel module missing falling back to nouveau - GPU ignored

My 10 years old Linux desktop is running Fedora, with the NVIDIA Geforce GTX 660 Ti graphics card. For the driver, I've been using RPMFusion's akmods [https://rpmfusion.org/Packaging/KernelModules/Akmods] tool to have the kernel modules built at boot time in case. After an

Macbook Pro 16 2019 heat problem with external display

Updated 2023-06-16: After 3 years, I was eligible for a Macbook refresh. I "solved" the overheating problem with a hardware upgrade to a Macbook Pro 14 inch, M1 Max, 32 GB RAM, 2021 M1 Silicon architecture. The change is documented in my dotfiles. After nearly 2 years of

Unblock CI/CD pipelines with async needs depedendencies

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Efficient DevSecOps Pipelines in a Cloud Native World - free workshop

Getting started with CI/CD has become more easy with the DevOps platform era [https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2021/08/03/welcome-to-the-devops-platform-era/]. GitLab provides a new pipeline editor to help with onboarding, and allow to prevent common configuration mistakes. Pipelines and their definitions are always changing, and a work

Upgrade to Ghost v4 with Docker Compose

Upgrade to Ghost v4 with Docker Compose

When Ghost 4 [https://ghost.org/changelog/4/] was released earlier this year, I've looked into the upgrade from the initial v3 based setup in docker-compose [https://dnsmichi.at/2020/02/09/new-blog/]. Unfortunately, the container based setup is not officially supported, and there were no upgrade guides

Efficient pipelines in GitLab CI/CD: Parallel Matrix Builds + !reference

Efficient pipelines in GitLab CI/CD: Parallel Matrix Builds + !reference

Today I was diving deeper into GitLab CI/CD Pipeline Efficiency tricks, after I discovered resuable job attributes with !reference [https://dnsmichi.at/2021/09/17/reusable-job-attributes-in-other-jobs-in-gitlab-ci-cd-with-reference/] last week. Resource optimization is a big topic, and next to ideas on failing fast, I was looking into more parallelization. Luckily GitLab