Last time I deliberately broke Pods three ways and watched them fail to start
(CrashLoopBackOff and friends).
This time the Pods are all Running and healthy — and things still don't work.
The bug isn't in the Pod; it's in the plumbing around it: the Service → Endpoints → Pod
forwarding chain, and the PVC → StorageClass → PV binding chain.
The skill here is knowing which link broke without guessing.

I wanted the homepage stats bar to show a current online users number, next to the build-time stats (posts, tags, days since last post). It sounds like a one-liner, but a static site fundamentally cannot call the GA4 Realtime API directly — the API needs a service-account private key, and anything you ship to the browser is public. This post is the whole path I took: the build-time-vs-runtime split, why a proxy is mandatory, the Cloudflare Worker that signs its own Google token, wiring the frontend, and the three traps I fell into along the way.

A Pod STATUS of CrashLoopBackOff isn't a single error —
it's an umbrella term for "the container keeps failing to start and kubelet keeps restarting it."
The same STATUS can have completely different root causes.
Today I deliberately created three failure scenarios; the way you investigate each one differs.

Two weeks ago I gave myself a task: write a Helm chart from scratch and really get Helm.
After finishing the exercise, I also did a tool-selection exercise alongside it,
thinking about why I'd choose Helm when Kustomize is simpler.
I asked myself "what capability does this situation actually need," letting the requirements pick the tool, rather than letting features pick me.

Today's learning task started out simple: install the helm-diff plugin, try helm diff upgrade once, and understand why you'd want it in production.

Instead, from the helm plugin install moment onward, I hit 4 pitfalls in a row — and the last one let me actually witness how "the diff shows no change, but the real deployment changes things" happens. Here's the whole process, written down.

I started picking up Helm this week — reading the official template guide while writing a chart by hand, and also taking apart one of Bitnami's big charts. Here are the three concepts I found most important, written down as notes to my future self.