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This article is currently being tweaked, drafted and is not yet complete. I’m sharing it early to document my process, so feel free to take a look at the current progress. I expect to finalize the content in my next commit
THANKS FOR READING 🧐!
DO ENJOY YOURSELF IN THE PROCESS 😇!
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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 getent and dig commands. Then, your career shifts. You move into orchestrating Kubernetes, 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.
It was a humbling moment. 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” I’ve decided that I’m not okay with those skills staying lost. I’m starting a new series here on JayJay’s DevOps Diaries called Forgotten Debug Skills.
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.
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