mbrt blog

I’m a Software Engineer / Site Reliability Engineer. My main interests are related to Linux, Kubernetes, C++, Rust, Go, security and reverse engineering. In Real Life I love reading sci-fi and historical novels, travel, listen to music and play sports with friends and family.

Maybe you don't need SRE

Running a Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) organization correctly is difficult and expensive. Spare the frustration, perhaps what you need is Sysadmins. Since the term was coined by Ben Treynor in 2003 at Google, lots of ink was spent on praising SRE practices. Not enough on when it is appropriate to have SREs. This post is a take on that angle. Disclaimer: I was an SRE at Google and this piece represents only my own views....

December 17, 2023 · 18 min · Michele Bertasi

Engineering a chess match against my brother

This is the story of me trying to win a game of chess against my brother. A single freaking game. What’s so special about it? Am I good at chess? Not at all. Did I improve at my game in the process? Also no. Is it a story about “the journey rather than the destination”? Not really. Did I at least have fun in the process? Not so sure. This is the story of me trying to be unconventional at probably the most studied game in existence and using my software engineering background for something that probably doesn’t need it....

May 28, 2021 · 17 min · Michele Bertasi

Demystifying container networking

Over the last year, at work I had multiple chances to debug how containers work. Recently we had to solve some networking problems a customer had with Kubernetes, and I decided I wanted to know more. Once the problem was solved, I spent more time on investigating what is actually going on under the hood. After seeing the wonderful Eric Chiang and Laurent Bernaille talks, and reading through the very informative posts by Lizzie Dixon and Julia Evans (that I really really recommend), I got enough information about how a container is created and managed....

October 1, 2017 · 34 min · Michele Bertasi

Antifurto: home made security camera

Introduction In February 2014 I had a very unpleasant surprise after coming back home from a weekend in Berlin. Me and my girlfriend found out our apartment upside down because of burglars. We suffered the loss not only of many of our belongings, but worse, of our safety. We didn’t feel safe in our home and we didn’t feel safe to leave it - not even for half an hour - for the fear to come back and find somebody inside....

July 7, 2017 · 29 min · Michele Bertasi

Ripgrep code review

I’ve been playing around with Rust for a year and a half, and the best part of it, like many others say, has been the very helpful community. There are a lot of online resources that help you to get started: the Rust book, the Rustonomicon and many blog posts and stack overflow questions. After I learned the basics I felt a bit lost though. I couldn’t find enough resources for intermediate-level-Rustaceans....

December 1, 2016 · 29 min · Michele Bertasi