Learn DevOps, SRE & AI engineering on real clusters, not slides.
Every episode comes with the lab behind it: the exact commands, the real output, and what broke. Plus interview prep written by a working senior platform engineer.

Episodes
Long-form episodes where everything on screen ran for real. Each one links to its lab.

SRE Mock Interview
A full SRE interview with a live production incident on a real Kubernetes cluster: fundamentals, CrashLoopBackOff and OOMKilled, a rollback that didn't fix it, Linux on-call, observability, system design for four nines and a blameless postmortem.

AI Engineer Roadmap 2026
The 7-stage roadmap from a working platform engineer: foundations, LLMs, RAG, evals, agents and tools, shipping to production, and security. Every stage built and run for real.
Platform Engineer Mock Interview
The deep platform interview: kubectl apply internals, scheduling and preemption, networking, Karpenter on real EKS, Argo CD drift, Terraform state, multi-tenancy and policy, a live Postgres failover, and designing a platform for 200 engineers.
Labs you can run tonight
Copy-paste setup, the real output from our run, and the explanation of what happened. Most run on a laptop with kind.
Kubernetes Incident Lab: Production Is Down
Break a real checkout service with a bad release, then debug it like an on-call SRE: CrashLoopBackOff, OOMKilled (exit 137), a rollback that doesn't fix it, a service selector trap, a capaci…
AI Engineer Lab: Local LLMs, RAG, Evals and a Safe Agent
Run open-source models locally with Ollama, see tokens and temperature for yourself, build a small RAG app over Kubernetes runbooks, write an eval that catches a retrieval failure, and build…
Platform Engineering Lab: Scheduling, GitOps, Terraform, Policy and Postgres
Everything from the platform engineer interview, on a 3-node kind cluster labelled as three zones: what kubectl apply really sends, topology spread, priority and preemption, Argo CD drift an…
Karpenter on EKS: From Pending Pods to a New Node in 30 Seconds
A real Amazon EKS cluster with Karpenter 1.15. Five pods that don't fit, a NodePool with a hard CPU limit, Karpenter picking one right-sized instance in about 30 seconds, and consolidation r…
Learning paths
Step-by-step routes through the episodes, labs and guides, in the right order.
DevOps → SRE
Learn to think like an SRE: SLOs and error budgets, debugging a real outage, and the questions SRE interviews actually ask.
DevOps → Platform Engineer
Go from running pipelines to building the platform: Kubernetes internals, GitOps, Terraform, Karpenter, multi-tenancy and databases.
DevOps → AI Engineer
Use what you already know about infrastructure to build AI features people can trust: local models, RAG, evals and safe agents.
Land the job
The job-search side: a resume that gets callbacks, applications that don't read as AI spam, and first rounds you walk out of confident.
Guides
Eight focused guides for technical interviews and the job search. Want the full system? Every guide has a Mastery Edition.

The Kubernetes Interview Cheat Sheet
Architecture, core objects, kubectl reference, troubleshooting playbook, networking, storage, RBAC, autoscaling, and 30 interview questions with spoken-style answers.

100 SRE Interview Questions & Answers
Every question paired with a complete, real answer — not just a hint — organized into 10 categories so you can study your weak spot first.

The System Design Interview Framework
One repeatable 6-step framework, 3 fully worked examples with polished diagrams, a complete pattern catalog, and the vocabulary that signals fluency under pressure.

AI Integration for DevOps & SRE Engineers
A practical, role-specific playbook for using AI inside the job you already have — incident response, IaC, observability, automation, and capacity planning — with real prompts and clear guardrails.

How to Make Your Resume Bullets Pop
The exact formula recruiters and ATS systems respond to, 25 real before/after rewrites for DevOps and SRE roles, how to quantify impact when you don't have exact numbers, and a full resume structure template.

How to Properly Apply for Jobs With AI
A real workflow for using AI to tailor applications, prep for interviews, and track your search — plus the mistakes that get AI-generated applications filtered out instantly.

How to Nail Every 1st Round Interview in Tech
What recruiters and hiring managers are actually scoring — the structure to use, the questions to expect, and real examples of what passes vs. what quietly ends candidacies.

The Job Search Reset
An honest, structured way to diagnose what's actually not working — and rebuild a search that converts.
From the blog
The episodes, written down, with the real commands and output. Plus one-page cheat sheets.
AI Engineer Roadmap 2026: What to Learn and What to Skip
A 7-stage AI engineer roadmap from a working platform engineer. Foundations, LLMs, RAG, evals, agents, production and security, each built and run for real.
ArticleKarpenter on EKS: Pending Pods to a Right-Sized Node in 30s
A real Karpenter 1.15 run on Amazon EKS. Five pending pods, a NodePool with a hard CPU limit, one right-sized node in about 30 seconds, then consolidation.
ArticleCrashLoopBackOff and OOMKilled (Exit 137) in a Real Incident
We broke a checkout service on a real Kubernetes cluster. CrashLoopBackOff, OOMKilled exit 137, a rollback that didn't fix it, and the service selector trap.
ArticleSRE Interview Questions 2026 with Strong Answers
The SRE interview questions that keep coming up in 2026, from SLOs and error budgets to exit code 137, burn rate alerts and postmortems, with answers that land.
One real lab in your inbox every week
Commands, output, and the one thing that usually breaks. No spam, no fluff.
One email a week, real labs only. Unsubscribe any time.