WireGuard is a modern VPN protocol built directly into the Linux kernel since version 5.6, and this guide walks through the full server and client setup on Debian 13 (Trixie) using nothing but the standard package manager and a handful of config files. Most sysadmins still reach for OpenVPN out of habit, but these days that often means accepting a slower tunnel, managing a certificate authority, and dealing with a config file that can run to 50 lines before you’ve done anything meaningful. WireGuard does the same job with just two config files, a key pair on each side, and…
Author: drweb
I remember the first time I tried to build a predictive model in Python – I had data, I had a vague idea of what I wanted, but I had no clue how to connect those two things into something that actually worked. That confusion is normal. Predictive modeling sounds intimidating because it sits at the intersection of statistics, machine learning, and software engineering. Let me walk you through exactly how it works, with a complete example you can run yourself. Here is what I cover in this article: what predictive analysis actually is, why it matters, the step-by-step process…
I have been building delivery route optimization tools in Python for several years now, and I keep running into the same problem when teaching newcomers: most tutorials either oversimplify the problem or jump straight into external solvers like Google OR-Tools without explaining the underlying algorithms. My goal with this article is to walk through the core techniques that power real route optimization, step by step, using only standard Python libraries. In my experience, understanding these foundational algorithms gives you a massive advantage. Whether you need to solve a simple Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) or a full Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem…
You’ve been retyping the same long commands for years, but sudo !!, !$, ^old^new, and a handful of Bash history tricks can cut that habit down to almost nothing and this guide covers every one of them with real examples. You type a long apt command to install a package, hit Enter, and the terminal shows back Permission denied. So you arrow-up, jump to the beginning of the line, type sudo, and hit Enter again. That little dance takes maybe 5 seconds, but you do it a dozen times a day, and it adds up, and that’s just one pattern.…
I keep coming back to base64 whenever I’m working with APIs, JWT tokens, or any system that needs to safely transmit binary data as text. The other day I needed to decode a webhook payload that came in as a base64 string, and I thought – I should write down exactly how I did this, because the gotchas are real. Base64 is one of those tools that looks simple on the surface but trips up a lot of people. You take some bytes, you get a string. You take the string back, you get bytes. Easy – except the encode/decode…
The Model Context Protocol (MCP) is moving faster than the developer community can keep up with, racing past its original design parameters and leaving teams scrambling to build clients that can match its pace. The result is an ecosystem where the protocol itself keeps shifting under everyone’s feet, and where the tooling, conventions and security thinking that should accompany a foundational standard are still being figured out on the fly. Joey Stout, solutions architect at Spacelift, joins Mike Vizard to make the case that this is the price of being early. Stout describes an environment that increasingly resembles a Wild…
I remember when I first came across Maximum Likelihood Estimation. I was working on a project that needed to estimate some unknown parameters, and a colleague suggested I look into MLE. honestly, it sounded more complicated than it actually was. The core idea is pretty straightforward: you have some data, and you want to find the parameter values that make your data most likely to occur. Here how I think about it. every dataset comes from a probability distribution, but you do not know the exact parameters. MLE helps you find the parameter value that maximizes the likelihood of seeing…
The development community saw this one coming: GitHub will transition its Copilot service to a usage-based billing model on June 1, replacing its existing system of fixed subscriptions supplemented by premium request limits. As reported last week, GitHub suspended new sign-ups for several of its Copilot subscription tiers as it faced a surge in demand from agentic coding workflows. To address that, under GitHub’s new pricing model, customers across individual, business, and enterprise tiers will receive a monthly allocation of AI credits, which are consumed based on token usage. This includes input, output, and cached data processed by underlying models.…
I have been working with text data for years, and I keep coming back to the same tool whenever I need to find or transform strings in Python. That tool is the re module. It is one of those things that once you understand, you start seeing opportunities to use it everywhere – parsing logs, validating user input, cleaning up datasets. Throughout this tutorial, I want to show you how to use regular expressions in Python to handle a specific problem: matching strings that satisfy certain conditions. I will walk through the key functions in the re module, and then…
DevOps.com is now providing a weekly DevOps jobs report through which opportunities for DevOps professionals will be highlighted as part of an effort to better serve our audience. Our goal in these challenging economic times is to make it just that much easier for DevOps professionals to advance their careers. Of course, the pool of available DevOps talent is still relatively constrained, so when one DevOps professional takes on a new role, it tends to create opportunities for others. The ten job postings shared this week are selected based on the company looking to hire, the vertical industry segment and…