This week I learned a lot about containers and especially kubernetes. It’s odd that Chrome’s spellchecker doesn’t recognize the word, but anyway this was my first introduction to using containers at all. It was a project of deploying several raspberry pis for a contact tracing program and they are running on a Docker swarm. I understand I said I learned about kubernetes especially, but that’s because the guy who set up the swarm and taught me how to do that also said I should learn Kubernetes because it’s the future of everything. Which is kind of cryptic but it led me to a lot of really interesting research. It’s not something that would be used for my project, but there are a lot of projects at work that would be great to use containers on and especially to help with documentation and reproducibility. Based on a lot of things I’ve taken over that have zero documentation I’ve been making it a priority lately with all my work to document it in a way that someone could take it over from square one and be able to rebuild it exactly as I’ve set it up. There have been a couple “mystery servers” that I’m not really sure what they do but I also can’t touch them for fear of bringing a lot of systems down. It’s a nightmare.
As far as feedback for this course goes, overall I’ve been very happy with the course. I enjoy that the writing is geared towards a professional environment and I feel like when I’m writing I am doing so with a professional audience in mind. The feedback for each paper have reinforced this and overall I feel I am growing as a writer. It’s also nice getting feedback on discussion boards and blog posts. Even though this is an online course, the feedback makes it feel like there’s some more interaction than turning in work and just getting a grade for it. Being 100% remote for school has made things feel much less interactive than in the past, but these are some things that help.
