Growing up, my mother repeatedly said “If you dont blow your trumpet, it would rust!!”
It happens to all of us. You spend years in the trenches of systems administration, mastering the intricacies of BIND 9, manually tweaking MX records, and living inside nslookup, getent, host and dig commands. Then, your career shifts. You move into orchestrating Docker & CICD, managing IaC with Terraform, and focusing on cloud-native abstractions.
Suddenly, you find yourself staring at a simple DNS issue, and it hits you: the muscle memory for the “basics” has started to fade.
The “Use It or Lose It” Reality
Recently, I found myself needing to debug a DNS issue. I reached for the terminal expecting my fingers to do the work, only to find that my mental reference manual for dig and nslookup had a few too many blank pages.
I type those same commands that once made me look like a legend and the output looks like ancient Greek. I struggle just to remember the syntax, and even if I do remember, I still have to beg AI to explain what they results mean .. I feel worse than a noob. 😂🤖
It was a humbling moment when I realized that while I’ve been busy leveling up in DevOps, I’ve accidentally “unlearned” the core building blocks that made me a strong engineer in the first place.
The New Series: “Forgotten Debug Skills”
Turns out I’m not alone. While chatting with a few DevOps folks, so many said the same: we all find ourselves wandering back through territory we once ruled, just to jog our memory.
I’ve decided that I’m not okay with those skills staying lost. I’m starting a new series here on HalfKnoWn.co.uk AKA JayJay’s DevOps Diaries called Forgotten Debug Skills.
While digging around, I found loads of amazing blogs and guides that refreshed my memory and reignited that old passion. I won’t plagiarise their work, rather I would share them here. In fact thats what inspired this post, I would rather just list Amazing Blogs and Articles for future reference.
The goal is simple:
Reflect & Recall: Whenever I encounter a fundamental task I’ve grown “rusty” on, I’m going to document the process of relearning it.
Curate Resources: I’ll be sharing the best websites, cheat sheets, and docs that helped me jog my memory and get back up to speed.
Build a Personal Index: By writing these down, I’m creating a permanent, searchable reference library for my future self (and hopefully, for anyone else who has felt the same “knowledge gap”).
Follow Along
This isn’t just about showing off what I know; it’s a candid look at what I’ve forgotten and how I’m reclaiming it. If you’re an engineer who feels like your “fundamental” game needs a refresh, stick around.
Below is my curated list: articles I love, resources with great vibes, and pieces I want to keep handy. Some are refreshers, some are just really cool reads. Either way, I’m saving them so I never have to Google again.
This list will never be finished — I’ll keep adding more awesome links whenever I find them.
https://www.cloudns.net/blog/dns-troubleshooting-tools-commands/
https://emojidb.org/summer-emojis
https://phoenixnap.com/kb/helm-delete-deployment-namespace
https://phoenixnap.com/kb/author/milica-dancuk
https://oneuptime.com/blog/post/2026-01-17-helm-install-applications-charts/view
https://phoenixnap.com/kb/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/Helm-cheat-sheet-by-PhoenixNAP.pdf
https://blog.dnsimple.com/2017/08/debugging-dns/
DNS Troubleshooting – tools and commands Dig command. ClouDNS Free DNS tool. Traceroute. NSLookup. Host command.