You don’t need many tools to write Rust—just a decent editor, and maybe an AI assistant or two. Here’s my Rust dev setup in 2026.
All tagged dev skills
The secret consultant: your first steps to independence
At work, nobody need know you’re a secret consultant. As well as preparing you to run your own business someday, it might also make you a better employee.
Dips and wiggles: Prometheus, Grafana, and Checkly
Here’s how to connect your Checkly metrics to Prometheus and Grafana and turn them into useful dashboards.
“Wakeups”: the most important DevOps metric
“How many times were your people woken up by faults in production?” JAX DevOps talks to John about metrics, security, testing, and automation.
“Frowning at a screen for 200 hours”: on the writing process
John Arundel on his first steps as an author: “If just one person is helped and inspired by this book... then I’m not giving refunds to the others.”
Build bridges, not walls
We live in a world of walls, unfortunately, and some people would like to build even more of them. Whatever you think about that, the walls between software developers and IT operations staff don’t do anybody any favours.
Sysadmins take note
Working scientists keep a lab notebook in which they write down everything they did, and what the results were. Sysadmin work is also about careful, scientific, detailed experimentation, especially when troubleshooting.
Put a little Pixie in your cluster
Pixie is a powerful troubleshooting and telemetry tool for clusters. Let’s see how it can help solve the Case of the Sluggish Service.
Self-driving people: is independence for you?
Your car may be self-driving (up to a point), but are you? Independent-minded people sooner or later reach a point where they can’t rise higher without becoming the boss. Should you go it alone and start your own business?
Getting nothing done: how to let go and rest your mind
You don't need a special place, or a special time, or even special clothes, to meditate. It's just letting the mind rest when it's not needed, and that's the case more often than you might think.
Catching grace: don’t just do something, sit there
Meditation is easy when you know what to do: absolutely nothing! It's hard at first, like trying to look at the back of your own head, but there's a knack to it.
Checkly, Terraform, and automated site monitoring
Introducing the Checkly Terraform provider: what Terraform is and why you'd want to use it, and how to use Terraform to automate and manage your website monitoring with Checkly.
How to know when it's time to go
Leaving a job is never easy, and it’s a consequential decision. But when it’s time, it’s time. Here’s how to escape the comfort trap, and take the next step in your career.
Why you can't meditate: quieting the mind is impossible
You can't clear your mind, or achieve bliss by sitting on a special cushion. But you can start to gently train your brain to stop craving distraction and overstimulation. In this excerpt from Monk Mode, we'll see how.
Bitfield Institute of Technology
The Bitfield Institute of Technology (BIT) is a software engineering school that offers remote training and certifications in Go and Rust development to students worldwide.
Will write for food: becoming an independent tech author
In the final sizzling chapter of my career exposé, we’ll learn how I went from self-unemployment to founding the world’s tiniest publishing empire.
Pricing yourself: if you need the money, don't take the job
Money: how to get people to give it to you, how much to ask for, and how to be worth what you're asking. Some real talk about the challenges you’ll face as a newly independent worker.
Master of my domain: how I started my own business
Let’s talk business—independent business, that is. What’s the cost of being the boss? Some more hard-learned lessons from my own horrible career.
Being a good co-worker is your job now
In the final part of this series on the world of work, we’ll talk about how not to suck at meetings.
Not a real developer: transitioning from IT to dev
In the second part of my tell-all memoir, we find out why I was constitutionally unsuited to employment in a structured environment, or indeed any environment.