Top all-time · #1248
Alex Ellis
Personal blog · blog.alexellis.ioprogrammingsystems
Alex Ellis's personal blog at blog.alexellis.io covers programming and systems. Since 2016, 58 different Hacker News readers have linked it 541 times, most often “The Five Pressures of Leadership”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-09-15, and you can follow it by feed.
OSS, Cloud Native & Raspberry Pi
Most-linked posts?
- The Five Pressures of Leadership5 people · 22 mentions · first linked 2019-09-17
- Building Containers Without Docker5 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2020-01-25
- Exploring Multi-stage builds in Docker5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2017-03-24
- How to run Firecracker without KVM on cloud VMs4 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2025-02-12
- Attempting Linux on Microsoft Dev Kit 20234 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2022-10-31
- Builder pattern vs. Multi-stage builds in Docker4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2017-06-29
- State of netbooting Raspberry Pi in 20213 people · 9 mentions · first linked 2021-04-05
- Stripped-down Kubernetes on the Raspberry Pi3 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2019-03-11
- OpenFaaS accelerates serverless Java with AfterBurn (2017)3 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2017-09-01
- Docker is deleting Open Source images - here is what you need to know3 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2023-03-15
What Hacker News says?
It depends. Many are paid as career OSS developers to contribute to Kubernetes. The ingress-nginx maintainer just stepped down today because nobody would fund his work. https://twitter.com/aledbf/status/1347273455448842240?s=20 openfaas is also unfunded and a large project with many commercial end-(ab)users. https://www.openfaas.com Matt Holt behind Caddy gave up after years of struggle and managed to sell out to a…
Comment linking /the-5-pressures-of-leadership/
on “No meetings, no deadlines, no full-time employees”Submitted Cooling off your Raspberry Pi 4 as a story · 272 points
HN discussionI can sympathise with this on so many levels having dozens of large companies using OpenFaaS as part of their product or internally and not paying a dollar in sponsorships or for custom development. I wrote up my experiences last year and the options for building OSS projects in terms of funding. https://blog.alexellis.io/the-5-pressures-of-leadership/ Since writing that I think that building an indie company is pos…
Comment linking /the-5-pressures-of-leadership/
on “No More Free Work from Marak: Pay Me or Fork This”Submitted Serverless Raspberry Pi Cluster with Docker as a story · 247 points
HN discussionI'm also a solo developer, or at least building a Ltd company starting at one. I wrote up about my developer setup here, and thought it might be of interest. https://blog.alexellis.io/building-a-linux-desktop-for-cloud... Would folks like to see more posts about branching out and working for yourself? I'd consider writing-up my perspective from the UK if it was interesting to people here.
Comment linking /building-a-linux-desktop-for-cloud-native-development/
on “My Second Year as a Solo Developer”Submitted I wish I'd self-published sooner as a story · 216 points
HN discussionThis post reminds me very much of my own writing last year where I covered several of the same topics, https://blog.alexellis.io/the-5-pressures-of-leadership/ Hope this also resonates with you Andrew.
Comment linking /the-5-pressures-of-leadership/
on “My FOSS Story”Submitted First Impressions with the Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W as a story · 206 points
HN discussionHere's my first impressions and picture-rich review of the new revision - http://blog.alexellis.io/pizerow-first-impressions/
Comment linking /pizerow-first-impressions/
on “Raspberry Pi Zero W, with Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, priced at $10”Submitted GitHub Actions as a time-sharing supercomputer as a story · 205 points
HN discussionI wrote a post on The Five Pressures of Leadership in Open Source and can relate to what the author is talking about having done this for several years and now without any pay. https://blog.alexellis.io/the-5-pressures-of-leadership/
Comment linking /the-5-pressures-of-leadership/
on “The Internet Relies on People Working for Free”Submitted Bare-Metal Kubernetes with K3s as a story · 190 points
HN discussionThis bubbled up the other day which was interesting as well. https://blog.alexellis.io/building-containers-without-docker... It does seem like Docker will be holding back containers from achieving their true promise, as it flounders looking for profitability and chasing k8s. Its sad that we're still moving around tar balls without advancing some of the tooling around it. One of my biggest gripes as a non-k8s contain…
Comment linking /building-containers-without-docker/
on “Bocker – Docker implemented in around 100 lines of Bash (2015)”Submitted Pocket-sized cloud with a Raspberry Pi as a story · 188 points
HN discussionThis news is from September, I gave my first impressions on Hacker News then, here's my blog post including an interview from the team behind Blue Ocean. http://blog.alexellis.io/tag/jenkins/ They are doing a great job at reinventing JenkinsCI (but remember it's still Java)
Comment linking /tag/jenkins/
on “Blue Ocean”Submitted Stripped-down Kubernetes on the Raspberry Pi as a story · 171 points
HN discussionHi, what actually are _metal_ instances that are being used when you're on EC2 that have local NVME attached? Last time I looked, apart from the smallest/slowest Graviton, you have to spend circa 2.3k USD/mo to get a bare-metal instance from AWS - https://blog.alexellis.io/how-to-run-firecracker-without-kvm...
Comment linking /how-to-run-firecracker-without-kvm-on-regular-cloud-vms/
on “IO Devices and Latency”Submitted Get eyes in the sky with your Raspberry Pi as a story · 171 points
HN discussionAlex Ellis here - the author of Inlets and OpenFaaS. If you want to work on Open Source as a full-time career, the best option is to find a company that is working on or invested in an OSS project and join that team. Examples: VMware contribute heavily to Kubernetes. As do Azure, and a myriad of other companies from large to small. I tried this option, it has pros and cons, if you go for this one, let's hope you lik…
Comment linking /the-5-pressures-of-leadership/
on “Ask HN: Dear open source devs how do you sustain yourself”Submitted The state of netbooting Raspberry Pis as a story · 138 points
HN discussionI've written up my findings with trying to getting Linux working on the new Dev Kit - https://blog.alexellis.io/linux-on-microsoft-dev-kit-2023/
Comment linking /linux-on-microsoft-dev-kit-2023/
on “Available Today: Windows Dev Kit 2023 a.k.a. Project Volterra”Submitted Fast CI with MicroVMs as a story · 132 points
HN discussionI have first-hand experience of this with OpenFaaS and other projects and wrote-up about it here, if anyone is interested in some long-term experience - https://blog.alexellis.io/the-5-pressures-of-leadership/
Comment linking /the-5-pressures-of-leadership/
on “How to pay your rent with your open source project”Submitted Building Containers Without Docker as a story · 115 points
HN discussionI normally used minikube for openfaas development - I appreciate the efforts of the project, it's an invalueable tool. The DfM integration works very well for local development and I've got some screenshots below: https://twitter.com/alexellisuk/status/949595379326210048 Make sure you do a context-switch for kubectl too. I see some people talking about Swarm vs Kubernetes. Swarm has always maintained a less modular…
Comment linking /you-need-to-know-kubernetes-and-swarm/
on “Docker for Mac with Kubernetes”Submitted Building a Linux Desktop for Cloud Native Development as a story · 108 points
HN discussionIf you're after software engineering and not structural, then I have a fair amount of blog posts on Go, Kubernetes, Docker and OSS software - https://blog.alexellis.io/ You'll also find insights from building my own products and revenue in my weekly sponsors emails -> https://insiders.alexellis.io/ - I often post book reviews and learnings, like last week on copywriting and tangible vs intangible benefits.
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: What are some great engineering blogs?”Submitted Build your own bare-metal ARM cluster as a story · 100 points
HN discussionIf you want an automated build that you can run on any platform (not only Linux/Ubuntu) then check out my Docker guide: http://blog.alexellis.io/mine-zcash-with-docker/
Comment linking /mine-zcash-with-docker/
on “ZCash Will Be a Truly Anonymous Blockchain-Based Currency”Submitted First Impressions: Docker for Mac with Kubernetes as a story · 98 points
HN discussion
