The Invisible Service Every educational platform that runs learner code needs a grading engine. The engine is the part of the platform that takes a submission, executes it, and decides whether it ...
The TLS Problem at the Edge Every learning centre runs the platform on its own server. Each server hosts a handful of services: the backend API, the frontend, a Git service, a code runner, and a f...
The Paradigm Shift: Beyond the Shell Script Init For decades, the standard for Unix system initialisation was the SysV init system. It was simple, treating process startup as a sequential pipeline...
The ‘Default Configuration’ Bottleneck Out of the box, ZFS is a brilliant filesystem. It provides mathematical data integrity, instant snapshots, and seamless replication. However, the default ZFS...
The Legacy ‘Out of Memory’ Lockup Every Linux administrator has experienced the dreaded memory starvation lockup. A rogue database query or a memory-leaking application consumes all available RAM....
The Bottleneck of Legacy Storage Protocols For over two decades, iSCSI has been the workhorse of block storage in the traditional datacenter. It provided a reliable way to mount remote storage ove...
The Story: From a Running Club to the Whole Island The app started with a simple, practical need. I run with a local club, the Clube Desportivo Infante Dom Henrique, on the island of Madeira. Anyo...
The End of the ‘Expensive’ Logging Era For years, infrastructure teams have struggled with the “Logging Tax”-the massive operational and financial cost of storing and querying billions of system l...
The Pervasive Issue of ‘AI Slop’ The integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) into our daily engineering workflows has fundamentally changed how we operate. We use these tools to generate code,...
The Hidden Danger in the ‘Base Image’ You have written perfect, secure code. You’ve followed every Dockerfile best practice. But your base image (node:latest or python:3.11) contains a 2-year-old ...