Hello, World

Every blog has a first post. This is mine, and yes, I’m starting with the oldest cliché in the book.

It’s a cliché for a reason. Hello, World is the first program most of us ever ran, and this is the first thing I’m publishing here. Consider it a handshake: I’ll write, you read, and we’ll figure out the rest as we go.

Who am I?

I’m Rayhan, also known online as raexera, a DevSecOps engineer who spends most days between Terraform, Kubernetes, and whichever CI pipeline is on fire this week.

This blog is my public notebook. Some posts will be opinionated, others incomplete, and plenty will be wrong revisited as I learn better. That’s deliberate: writing in the open means getting corrected, and that’s exactly how I want it.

What to expect

This blog is deliberately general. No single niche, no editorial calendar; I write about whatever I want to remember, teach, or share.

The kinds of things I’ll write

• Work: infrastructure, security, and the systems I operate every day.
  • Terraform, Kubernetes, and CI pipelines
  • The boring engineering that keeps things running
• Technical: deep dives into problems I solved the hard way.
• Tips & tricks: small things that save an hour here and there.
• Code: snippets, tools, and experiments worth keeping.
• Notes of my life: hobbies, thoughts, and whatever else is worth remembering.

The only rule

If it’s worth remembering or sharing, it’s worth a post.

Why write in public?

1. Writing forces clarity. If I can’t explain it, I don’t understand it.
2. A public trail beats a private wiki when someone asks “where did you see that?”
3. Smarter people might correct me, and that’s a feature, not a bug.

The plan

• Launch the blog
• Set up code highlighting
• Publish at least once a month
• Write up my homelab setup

A taste of the content

Posts will lean on code over prose. The kind of Go I’d write to sort a list of posts:

type Post struct {
  Title     string
  Published time.Time
  Tags      []string
}

func latest(posts []Post) Post {
  sort.Slice(posts, func(i, j int) bool {
    return posts[i].Published.After(posts[j].Published)
  })
  return posts[0]
}

The kind of manifest I stare at every day:

apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
  name: blog
  labels:
    app: blog
spec:
  replicas: 2
  selector:
    matchLabels:
      app: blog
  template:
    metadata:
      labels:
        app: blog
    spec:
      containers:
        - name: blog
          image: raexera/blog:latest
          ports:
            - containerPort: 8080

The shell one-liners I actually type:

kubectl get pods --sort-by=.metadata.creationTimestamp

And when I move infrastructure around, the diff usually looks like this:

resource "google_container_cluster" "primary" {
  name     = "primary"
  location = "asia-southeast1"
  location = "asia-southeast2"
}

What I write with

A deliberately small stack:

How a post ships

What I type on

I have a slight obsession with HHKB-layout keyboards, both MX and Topre. Here’s the current daily driver:

Custom switches, keycaps, and the endless hunt for the perfect clack¹, a hobby that never quite feels finished.

The fine print

This site is built to be fast and quiet: no trackers, no popups, no “subscribe to my newsletter” banner. Just words and code, rendered as plain HTML.

The source lives at https://github.com/raexera/raexera.github.io.

If you want to reach me, email is easiest: raexera@gmail.com

Thanks for reading. The next post is already in the works.