The Generalist or Jack of all trades

Heidi Harding — Sun, 10 Nov 2019 10:10:26 +0000

Today I am a developer, sort of... In my career I have programmed frontend and backend systems and everything in between. I've written 6303 assembler for embedded systems and racked servers in a datacenter. I would definitely consider myself a generalist with a broad knowledge of IT systems.

The things I liked doing 25 years ago are different to the things I like now. People change over time, yet this change is deemed a bad thing.
"Jack of all trades and master of none."

No matter what I have been hired to do I have always given 100% and managed to master the technology at hand in order to deliver the project.
So this isn't simply a matter of getting to use the newest "shiny" either. I have the ability to pivot in order to cope with the unexpected. This has significantly benefited several of my employers over the years.

One example I could give was when I joined a company as a Perl developer. I didn't necessarily think I was an amazing Perl developer and I was honest about this during the interview, but I demonstrated through previous experience and Perl projects that I did in my free time that I was willing to learn and improve.

It was a "foot in the door" moment for me as this job was in a new country and I was happy that they'd decided to give me a chance.

Shortly after I started I found myself developing Java, C#, XSLT and a whole host of other diverse projects. Whilst nobody else in the IT department could pick up these other projects, I could.
I did what needed to be done without the company having to go and hire individual specialists. They saved time and money interviewing and on-boarding and the work got done.

So come on interviewers, maybe give generalists a bit more of a chance in the future.

Ingress in Kubernetes with Docker for Windows

Heidi Harding — Wed, 30 Oct 2019 15:27:32 +0000

-- Edited: They've now included information in the official documentation relating to setting up an ingress controller in Docker Desktop for mac and windows: https://kubernetes.github.io/ingress-nginx/deploy/#docker-desktop
This remains as an archive

I am currently in the process of moving my dev systems from my 2017 Macbook Pro over to my new X1 Extreme gen. 2. On the Mac I had previously used minikube for my Kubernetes needs but I wanted to use the Docker for Windows Kubernetes option instead.

Enabling an Ingress controller was a fairly straight forward affair with minikube. Simply use:
minikube addons enable ingress
and there you go. kubectl get pods should then list your controller and it was automatically available from outside of your cluster.

I spent several hours trying to get an Ingress controller to work under Windows. Ultimately it was just as easy as minikube, however it really wasn't obvious. Therefore, I decided to pen this short article in case anyone else is experiencing the same problem.

In the documentation for the Nginx Ingress controller it states that you must run the mandatory command:
kubectl apply -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/kubernetes/ingress-nginx/master/deploy/static/mandatory.yaml

If you perform this step on its own, you will end up with an empty Address when entering: kubectl describe ing because there is no service connecting the pod to the outside world.

There is no further information on this page for how to install a service for Windows, however if you follow the Docker for Mac instructions then it will work just fine. The following command made everything start up perfectly for me:
kubectl apply -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/kubernetes/ingress-nginx/master/deploy/static/provider/cloud-generic.yaml

I am running with Docker for Windows version 2.1.0.3 stable using WSL.

I hope this helps someone :)

DEV Community: Heidi Harding

The Generalist or Jack of all trades

Ingress in Kubernetes with Docker for Windows