Markizano.NET

Software these days seems to becoming less and less maintainable. I serve as a buffer for this by maintaining my own aptly repository. In this way, I can host packages I can install on my systems in a coherent way that's as simple as apt-get install my-custom-package . This also works great for software (like Discord) where they offer a DEB file download, but don't maintain their own repo. Why is beyond me and outside the scope of this post. However, you can use this to build custom Debian based packages and maintain them in your own package repository. In this post, I'm going to show you how you can install your own if you want to maintain it and how you can add mine if you want to leverage the hosting of the packages I maintain or just keep track. Add apt.markizano.net The simplest thing you could do is to add my hosted repository for the software that I maintain in a Debian-based repository. Here are the steps: Install the key in the apt trusted directory: sudo ...

Sometimes, a humble Python script is all you need. We’re going to talk about “Markizano’s Video Forge” This is a video editing project that started as a hack and evolved into something I use all the time to get my videos posted. For more info about the history, you can checkout the video here . MKZ Forge has several features, including: Video concatenation Silence detection and removal (for those dead-space moments in the video) Subtitle generation Thumbnail image generation Title and Description generation via AI Built-in web interface so you can kick off the process from a browser (mobile or desktop) In this video, we’ll step thru the source code a bit to understand the differences between what it was per my last video and what it is today. As a bonus, I’ll also walk you thru 2 system prompts I use to help me refine my thoughts and output higher quality videos by having AI help me write my video copy, structure my thoughts and give you a better experience than my brain b...

High Compliance Environments Engineers and product managers in high compliance environments know their organizations are going to be slow to adopt AI in their environments because they already have so much governance and red tape that it's nearly impossible to make any updates in a risk-aware environment with compliance baked into the process. Ya'll working in health insurance, banking, communications, government contracts with regards to national defense and beyond all know the trials of high-compliance and regulations like SOC2, HIPAA, PCI and dealing with PII in secure environments. The CISO's understand the security implications of allowing more chaos into the environment via a probabilistic agent operating in the environment, let alone a human. The difference is the human is bound by the legal agreements and contracts we make whereas the LLM is bound by what it digitally has access to and can actually/literally do. By the way, not all threats are of a malicious natur...

AWS, Azure and GCP are not the same. Many job postings I see them group Azure, GCP and AWS as if they are the same thing. They are not. As someone who's worked in all 3 environments, while they offer the same services, there's distinctions that need to be made that we are not classifying and we need to stop thinking skills just transfer via osmosis between all 3 environments. Seriously, if you're going to disqualify someone for having SaltStack experience when you are looking for Ansible or Terraform experience, then why don't you hold the same regard for the cloud environment of your choice? Make it clear in the job description if you are going to be that picky about your cloud provider as you are for your toolchain. Honestly, adaptability should be regarded as the highest of abilities any engineer could have since they can theoretically survive in any environment. It's my opinion that "hackers" are usually going to be your most effective employees. By...

Stop writing code directly in your Lambda functions! I see this pattern a lot in AWS based environments that employ Lambda functions to create serverless environments and wanted to touch on something. I suppose this could be applied to GCP and Azure as well. In this post, I'm going to convey a concept you can take with you and apply in your organization to help with a separation of duties. I often take this for granted because I've been doing this pattern for so long that it's almost a no-brainer to me. IaC: Infrastructure as Code Often times, folks employ tools like AWS CDK, Terraform, SaltStack, Ansible, Puppet or Chef to manage infrastructure as code to describe how they want their environment to look or describe how they want to deploy the infrastructure. There's nothing wrong with this except when you have to embed code itself into the IaC or configuration. So the idea is to use your IaC to describe the infrastructure itself and not include code artifacts a...

If you want a video version of this post, checkout my YouTube on this subject with visuals. In this post, I want to break down the anatomy of a framework and help you understand how you can use code to help you understand how software works on a high level without getting into the specifics of any particular language or existing framework. Top-Level Descriptors At the root of the project, you'll often find a bunch of files. These are often helper files that help you understand the project itself and usually from just the list of the files, you can quickly determine the coding language used and possibly any frameworks, patterns and dependencies used in this particular project. Let's break down some commonalities across projects: README Almost every codebase will have a README. This is the first file that people will see when viewing your project. It often contains starter information like what your project is, how to install and other optional info like how to contribute...