The end of the Monthly Roundup 🫡

Published about 3 hours ago • 3 min read

Hello, fellow Server Dweller!

All good things come to an end. After sending the last round-up about a week ago, I realized that iximiuz Labs has outgrown the format.

A single monthly email served us rather well when I could fit all the platform's announcements, the materials published on the site during the month, and the interesting reads I came across into under 1,000 words. But the last email was well above 3,000 - even though I tried pretty hard to condense it. And let's be honest - almost no one reads such huge emails.

Another issue with the once-a-month dispatch is that you're basically deferring the learning. I've been trying to address it with dedicated email notifications on new challenges, but it was rather ad hoc - you'd still need to wait until the end of the month to learn about the new tutorials, skill paths, course lessons, or some interesting developments/good reads.

So with bittersweet feelings, I decided to kill the format... and replace it with something (hopefully) better.

iximiuz Labs Blog

First and foremost, I decided to revive the good old blog - but this time, with a new home: https://labs.iximiuz.com/blog.

The format of a blog post is way more liberating than that of a tutorial. I've been trying to keep iximiuz Labs Tutorials well polished and strictly educational. But on the blog, I'm planning to explore ideas more freely, post rants (of arbitrary lengths), and comment on articles that I find helpful and/or entertaining.

In particular, the blog will replace the "What I was reading" section of the roundup.

RSS and Daily/Weekly Email Digest

It took me rather a while (and lots of people have asked about it), but since a few days ago, iximiuz Labs has finally gotten an RSS/Atom feed 🎉

And it's not just a feed - you can use it to subscribe to arbitrary subsets of materials:

All happenings, including new blog posts:

labs.iximiuz.com/feed.rss

Only learning materials (but no blog posts):

labs.iximiuz.com/feed.rss?exclude-kind=blog-post

Tutorials by a single author:

labs.iximiuz.com/feed.rss?kind=tutorial&author=ivan-velichko

...or any other combination - just find the RSS feed icon on the page and give the UI constructor a shot:

And probably the best part about the standard RSS format is that not only do readers support it - Kit, the email subprocessor that delivered you this email - understands RSS, too.

If you want to receive a daily or weekly digest of new materials published on iximiuz Labs, you can enable the notifications using this shiny new dashboard widget. I also took the liberty of auto-enabling it for those of you who were already subscribed to notifications about new challenges. But if you don't like it, disabling it is just a single click.

In particular, this solves the "deferred learning" issue of a single monthly email.

iximiuz Labs Newsletter

Of course, the newsletter itself is here to stay. I will use it for important announcements (of new features, good deals, etc.), large content releases, and sporadic rants on server-side topics that don't fit any other format.

Another good thing about the format redesign is that I made it possible to unsubscribe from the newsletter while opting in to the content digest emails and/or keeping the daily Docker roadmap practice notifications going. You can configure it using the same shiny new dashboard widget.

Bonus 1: Fresh Learning Materials

It's been just a few days since the last round-up, but the platform has already gotten a number of great tutorials and challenges published 🚀

Systems programming tutorials by Başar Subaşı:

Linux Processes: Threads & Concurrency

Explore what a thread actually is in Linux, how threads relate to processes, how the Linux kernel treats both as tasks (task_struct), and how kernel scheduling enables concurrency.

Memory layout of a single-threaded process showing virtual address space segments from low to high memory.

Using Go for Systems Programming

Discover how Go functions under the hood as a modern systems programming language. Learn how Go makes system calls directly, resulting in self-contained binaries that have no libc dependencies.

How Go reaches the kernel: No libc required, everything is built into the binary.

The Podman series continued by Shan Desai:

Managing Podman Instances Remotely

Learn how to control multiple podman instances on remote machines without manually SSHing into them and explore how to deploy your Compose application stacks without SCP / SSH with the podman remote feature and Docker Compose v2

Overview Diagram of how podman remote feature can be used by developers & platforms

New CKA/CKAD-styled Kubernetes challenges by Omkar Shelke:

And a new playground by yours truly: NixOS

A ready-to-use NixOS server for exploring the full Nix experience without installing it on your own machine.

Bonus 2: Gift Cards and The Team Plan

These two features actually deserve their own newsletter issue, but I don't really want to annoy people with too many emails.

If you want to get premium access to iximiuz Labs for your friend or your entire team (as a manager), it's now just a couple of clicks away. And gift cards even look decent, so they can be used as a real present for a friend or a family member.

Happy hacking!

Ivan

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