Tutorials

One of my first tasks as a technical writer was to document a Kubernetes-based release orchestration tool. Not daunting at all. At that time, I could provide a vague description of Kubernetes, but hadn’t the foggiest idea what it actually looked like. There aren’t many opportunities in life to just play with a Kubernetes cluster - at least, not without spending thousands of dollars on AWS. Fortunately, I discovered minikube, a free solution for installing a single-node cluster Kubernetes on your local machine. With this setup, I’ve been able to experiment with various products and projects. Thanks to a couple of clever add-ons, you can even simulate load balancers and DNS servers, too. ...

Introduction In the olden days, it would take hours to install and configure a web server on a local machine. It was especially fiddly if you wanted to recreate a specific environment for testing purposes. Happily, Docker has made our lives much easier. In this tutorial, we’ll package a simple website and nginx server as a Docker image. Anyone with Docker Desktop installed can then run that site in seconds without having to set up anything. ...

Introduction Jekyll is a beautifully simple way to build and deploy a static website. Well, it’s simple once you’ve got everything installed and configured. Unless you’re already confident with Ruby, it’ll probably take you most of a wet weekend to get it running consistently. Although the local installation is working well for me, I’m nervous it’ll break. I’m already encountering a few Ruby conflicts with other projects. Resolving those issues isn’t my idea of fun. Given I’ve been doing a lot of work with Docker lately, I decided to see whether I could run my site as a container instead. Plot spoiler: yes, I could! ...

In this short tutorial, I’ll show you how you can create a checklist in InDesign that’s both interactive and printable. I’m assuming you already know the basics of InDesign. If not, I recommend the InDesign Essentials course on Skillshare.

Once you get into audio and video recording, background noise will drive you absolutely mad. Although there are lots of solutions out there, most of them are very complicated and often expensive, too. In this short video, I’ll show you a simple method for removing background noise in a free tool called Audacity.