Explorations

A connected set of learning sites for platform engineers and developers. Not tutorials, not documentation — practical paths from "never touched this" to shipping confidently in production.

The Approach

01

Get it working.

Every guide starts with a real scenario you'll recognize. You'll have something running before you fully understand why.

02

Understand it.

Then goes deeper — why does this resource exist? What is actually happening under the hood when you run that command?

03

Own it in production.

The goal is never certification. It's the confidence to debug at 2am when something breaks and nobody else is around.

The Series

Linux is the foundation. Kubernetes runs on Linux. Python automates both. Computer Science explains why any of it works.

New to the series? Start with Exploring Linux — it's the foundation everything else builds on.

Exploring Linux

30 articles

The foundation everything else runs on.

From first login to production confidence — not sysadmin training, practical Linux competence for developers and platform engineers who need to get work done.

Exploring Kubernetes

14 articles

Your company adopted it. This gets you functional — then fluent.

Start by getting your app deployed and debugging when it breaks. Then go past copy-pasted YAML: what each core object actually is — Pods, Services, config, namespaces, labels — why it's built that way, and its blast radius on a cluster you share.

Exploring GitOps

4 articles

Your platform team adopted Flux. This explains what changed.

GitOps with FluxCD — your desired state lives in Git and the cluster reconciles toward it. Day One gets developers working confidently on a Flux-enabled cluster: what changed, why you commit instead of kubectl apply, and how to read what Flux is doing.

Exploring Python

11 articles

For platform engineers who already know bash.

Task-first, not syntax-first. You don't need to understand decorators before you can write a health-check poller. This site starts with the task. The Python comes with it.

Exploring Computer Science

12 articles

You know how to code. This teaches you why it works.

The formal theory that makes you a stronger engineer — Big-O, data structures, FSMs, parsers, compilers. Not academic exercises; the stuff that makes you able to explain your own PR.

Exploring Dev Tools

2 articles

The tools that make working with everything else bearable.

Git workflows, editors, terminal multiplexers, and the other tools that separate engineers who fight their environment from ones who work in flow.