Luke Bearl

Local K8s Setup

Sun, 26 Apr 2026 12:30:36 -0500

Why local Kubernetes? Link to heading

Kubernetes has been orbiting my work for years—but I’ve never really needed it.

Most of the platforms I support are either legacy-heavy or simple enough that Docker Compose gets the job done. Even when I wanted something more “cluster-like,” Docker Swarm was usually sufficient.

Now

Sun, 26 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Last updated: April 2026

What I’m focused on Link to heading

Most of my time right now is focused on improving the reliability and maintainability of the systems I work on.

A lot of that comes down to:

making systems more resilient to failure
simplifying infrastructure and deployment workflows
reducing operational friction for teams over time

Less about new tech, more about making things actually work well in practice.

Bluesky

Sat, 14 Dec 2024 10:01:07 -0600

I’ve moved to Bluesky Link to heading

Hello All! While I was never super active on the bird site, given recent developments I’ve decided to migrate what little activity I have to Bluesky. So far the community that is developing there seems to be very positive and supportive.

Reminder Lights

Mon, 14 Oct 2024 19:48:05 -0500

What is it? Link to heading

A reminder light is a light that isn’t on all the time. When the light is on (or is a specific color), it is reminding you to do something. I’m using reminder lights in order to remember to take the trash out (every Monday night) and to give one of my dogs his medicine every morning. The concept is pretty simple: I have a multi-color light in the light socket over my kitchen sink (we rarely use that light). Every morning shortly before I get up, it turns on and turns blue in color. When I make my way downstairs and see the light on over the kitchen sink, I’m always reminded to prep my dogs medicine so that he can have it with his breakfast. Since the solution was working so well, I set up a second automation to turn on the light (green in this case) on Monday evenings to remind me to take out the trash.

New Blog

Tue, 17 Sep 2024 20:16:27 -0500

New Blog Link to heading

I decided to move off of WordPress and move to a static blog. Most of the time I prefer writing things in Markdown, so moving to a solution where everything is natively in Markdown makes a lot of sense to me. Before settling on Hugo I looked at a few other options (including of course contemplating writing a generator in C#, but that would be a terrible case of bikeshedding).

About me

Wed, 04 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Hi, I’m Luke, a software developer with over a decade of experience. My passion lies in solving complex problems in .NET environments, whether on Windows or Linux-based servers. Lately, my focus has shifted toward DevOps, where I work on building efficient, scalable systems that make life easier for both developers and operations teams.

When I’m not deep in code, you can usually find me exploring the great outdoors. I love hiking, backpacking, and pretty much anything that gets me out into nature. Living in Minnesota, I’ve learned to appreciate both the beauty and the challenges of every season.

SMS Tracker

Wed, 16 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

My wife and I have a senior dog who is starting to show his age. He has been having a lot of the issues that come with old age, and we needed a way to make sure that we were doing everything we can to keep him healthy. One of the big issues we were running into is remembering all of the stuff that happens daily: did he poop, did he get his medicine, etc.

Migrating from G Suite Legacy Free to iCloud

Thu, 20 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

For those of us who are on Google’s Legacy Free G Suite plan, there was an announcement the other day that all good things must come to an end. Sometime in the July timeframe everyone will need to either start paying or stop using the service. Fortuitously, Apple recently (in October) announced custom domain support for iCloud. For people who were using G Suite only as an email service (i.e. no Google Docs, or other Google Apps), and are only using it for personal accounts, iCloud can serve as a perfectly acceptable email host.

Duo Desire (a small IoT project)

Fri, 14 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000

My wife was watching Shark Tank a few weeks ago and we were both chatting about a thing we saw (which wasn’t funded). It was kind of a clever idea, and I’ll sidestep the entire discussion of whether or not it is a “good” product or not, I just wanted to see what it would take to build something kind of like it (this is loosely inspired by LoveSync, but the LoveSync does have some interesting features around time and also their hardware is much prettier than what I’m using).

Reducing Bandwidth Costs by Moving S3 Video to BackBlaze B2 with CloudFlare

Fri, 02 Nov 2018 00:00:00 +0000

I tweeted about the cost savings that I was able to achieve by moving some videos to S3. Unfortunately in my tweet I was off on the number’s a bit. Basically by switching costs went from $163.45 in September to $2.91 on Backblaze B2 in October (not quite as nice as I said in my tweet, only a 56x reduction in cost instead of a 100x reduction #oops).

Regardless of my inability to recall the amounts of bills, I figured it would be good to quickly document how I have everything setup. The setup instructions I followed are basically the same as what’s documented by Backblaze here. For the purposes of this guide, I’ll assume you already have a CloudFlare account (they have free plans available if you don’t).

Making EF work with DotNet SPA 2.0.0 prerelease

Wed, 21 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000

The Microsoft.DotNet.Web.Spa.ProjectTemplates::2.0.0-rc2-final SPA template currently has a little issue with making EF work properly. If you encounter this issue you’ll notice that running Update-Database in the Package Manager Console results in ng serve being run, which prevents the migrations from being applied.

To fix the issue, we need to slightly change Program.cs and Startup.cs as follows:

    public class Program
    {
        public static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            // This needs to have all of the code originally in BuildWebHost
            WebHost.CreateDefaultBuilder(args)
                .UseStartup<Startup>().Build().Run();
        }

        // This is only invoked by EF
        public static IWebHost BuildWebHost(string[] args) =>
            WebHost.CreateDefaultBuilder(args)
            .ConfigureAppConfiguration((ctx, cfg) =>
            {
                cfg.SetBasePath(Directory.GetCurrentDirectory())
                  .AddJsonFile("appSettings.json", true) // require the appsettings file!
                  .AddEnvironmentVariables();
            })
                .UseStartup<Startup>().UseSetting("DesignTime", "true").Build();
    }


PucciMon - Temperature and Humidity monitoring on a Raspberry Pi with 2-way SMS
Wed, 31 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000
Over the last weekend I decided it would be fun to brush off one of my old Raspberry Pis and play with some of the hardware that I bought for it a while back for a project I was going to do and subsequently abandoned. Overall what I wanted to accomplish was pretty simple: have a little C-based application which can read the AM2302 sensor which was attached to the Pi and use the Twilio REST interface via C in order to send messages.


PageRuleAdmin - Add CloudFlare Forwarding URLs easily
Tue, 02 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000
For a lot of the things my wife and I work on it is useful to have redirects from one page to another. In the classic developer spirit, instead of always logging into the CloudFlare dashboard and manually updating everything, I threw together a small utility in a few hours which allows her (a relatively non-technical user) to easily administrate the forwarding url page rules for all of the domains that we have running in CloudFlare (which is most of them).


MS SQL Server Backups to S3 - On Linux!
Wed, 06 Dec 2017 00:00:00 +0000
Today I’m going to go over what is necessary in order to do full and transaction log backups for SQL Server Express on Linux. One of the big limitations of SQL Express is that it doesn’t include the SQL Agent, so most of the maintenance tasks that can normally be designed and implemented within SSMS need to be rethought. Thankfully Microsoft released sqlcmd for Linux, which makes it pretty easy to go ahead and do the backups as simple bash scripts scheduled through cron.


The Bus Factor
Sun, 07 May 2017 00:00:00 +0000
I’ve been meaning to write this for quite a while, as the bus factor is something I’ve (literally) run into in my career. For those of you not familiar with it, the “Bus Factor” is basically an informal measure of resiliency of a project to the loss of one or more key members. It’s basically the programming version of the old adage “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket”.


YASC: Yet Another SSL Checker
Sun, 07 May 2017 00:00:00 +0000
I wanted to do a little side project in less than 24 hours, which is fairly simple, but enough to really get my feet wet with ASP.NET Core MVC. I decided to build a little tool which can examine current details of an SSL certificate, and also which you can use to get proactive emails when you are 30 days out from a certificate expiring. This was also a great opportunity to play with bootstrap 4 and C# 7.


HOWTO: Migrating from a VPS to GCP Compute Engine
Thu, 13 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0000
This post is going to be a brief guide on how to migrate a wordpress site from an existing host to Google Cloud’s Compute Engine service. Note that this guide assumes that multiple sites are being migrated, if only one is then that should make things slightly simpler.
At the end of this guide the site will be migrated, an SSL certificate from Let’s Encrypt will be provisioned and Apache will be doing it’s thing. I’ll leave it as an exercise to the reader to put the site behind CloudFlare (hint: if you are already there the only thing you probably have to change is your A records). For my purposes this guide will also include migrating all images and attachments to Google Cloud Storage.


Does it even exist if it isn't in source control?
Wed, 12 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0000
I was working on a little side project at work to make my employer’s data backup processes a bit more robust which involved writing a small console utility. I was asked if the code for the utility was already in source control (this code represented about 10 hours of effort on my part), and I almost replied “Does it even exist if it isn’t in source control?” Instead, of course, I simply sent the link to the repo where the code lives.


VPS Migration to GCP
Tue, 04 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0000
I’ve had all of the blogs that I manage on several VPSs hosted through RamNode for the past couple of years. While there is nothing wrong with RamNode, I figured it was about time to try out something new. I originally was going to move to AWS, since their MySQL RDS offering looked pretty compelling, but then I discovered Google pretty much had feature parity with the parts of AWS I was interested in (plus they have a much nicer value proposition than AWS does for hosting costs).


XUnit Test Lifecycles
Sun, 08 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000
You are unit testing right? I hope so. If you are you may have run into some scenarios where things are not working quite right. One issue I’ve personally run into is things which attempt to maintain state between tests (eww, I know). Unfortunately, while it is good practice to make sure all of the tests you are writing are completely independent from each other, sometimes shared state will creep in due to other factors (like using an in-memory database because Microsoft kills kittens* and didn’t make Entity Framework easy to mock out).


Goals for 2017
Sun, 01 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000
It’s a new year, so in the tradition of setting a few resolutions, here are a few of my professional goals for 2017:

More Networking
More Side Projects
More Reading
More Writing
Take Better Care of Myself

All of those things should be pretty easy, but there is the all important question of “Why?”

  Networking
  
    
    Link to heading
  

I work as a senior full-stack engineer at my full-time job, and also work as (the only) infrastructure engineer for my wife’s businesses (1, 2) both of which keep me fairly busy, but as a professional I’m always curious what other people are working on, and what other stacks are out there. In order to start getting more exposure to other ways people are doing things I’m going to start trying to attend at least one meetup a month just to chat with other developers and engineers. A stretch goal to this would be to find one or more conference (ideally within the Greater Los Angeles area) to attend.


A Gentle Introduction to Onion Architecture in ASP.NET MVC - Part 2
Wed, 19 Oct 2016 00:00:00 +0000
In part 1 of this series we discussed what an onion architecture application would look like and discussed the technologies that we can leverage in .Net 4 in order to make that work. In this section we’ll go over how the project is structured, including spending a bit of time looking at how the IoC container is configured. This being a simple application the configuration is significantly easier to understand than it can be in more complex applications.


A Gentle Introduction to Onion Architecture in ASP.NET MVC – Part 1
Mon, 19 Sep 2016 00:00:00 +0000
Welcome to part one of a multi part series on Enterprise Application in .Net Core! In this series we’ll go over everything that is necessary to build a best in breed enterprise application with the Onion Architecture at its core. The word enterprise is integral in describing the software being described as it is going to be software which is capable of being extended year after year in a clean fashion while allowing things to stay DRY and testable. We’ll cover the following:


PucciThe.Dog - Python/Flask on an RPI
Mon, 25 Apr 2016 00:00:00 +0000

  Overview
  
    
    Link to heading
  

Flask is an amazing little Python web micro-framework for those who aren’t familiar with it. It allowed me to build out this entire application in about 8 hours of total dev time (including a whole bunch of time just not quite grokking flask-login). The minimal goals I wanted to achieve was to expose a very basic web presence for Pucci (the dog), along with building a very basic puppy cam. Since I had an old Raspberry Pi lying around, I figured that this might be the ideal project to use it for.


One Month Retrospective
Sat, 09 Apr 2016 00:00:00 +0000

  One Month In
  
    
    Link to heading
  

The company I work for recently started a new initiative: a brand new piece of software completely divorced from the software we traditionally worked on. I along with three of my colleagues were selected to lead the entire architecture and build out all of the core features. All four of us are somewhat experienced developers, but none of us has ever worked on an architecture team at the very beginning of a software project which is very much enterprise-class software.

Luke Bearl

Local K8s Setup

Why local Kubernetes? Link to heading

Now

What I’m focused on Link to heading

Bluesky

I’ve moved to Bluesky Link to heading

Reminder Lights

What is it? Link to heading

New Blog

New Blog Link to heading

About me

SMS Tracker

Migrating from G Suite Legacy Free to iCloud

Duo Desire (a small IoT project)

Reducing Bandwidth Costs by Moving S3 Video to BackBlaze B2 with CloudFlare

Making EF work with DotNet SPA 2.0.0 prerelease

PucciMon - Temperature and Humidity monitoring on a Raspberry Pi with 2-way SMS

PageRuleAdmin - Add CloudFlare Forwarding URLs easily

MS SQL Server Backups to S3 - On Linux!

The Bus Factor

YASC: Yet Another SSL Checker

HOWTO: Migrating from a VPS to GCP Compute Engine

Does it even exist if it isn't in source control?

VPS Migration to GCP

XUnit Test Lifecycles

Goals for 2017

Networking Link to heading

A Gentle Introduction to Onion Architecture in ASP.NET MVC - Part 2

A Gentle Introduction to Onion Architecture in ASP.NET MVC – Part 1

PucciThe.Dog - Python/Flask on an RPI

Overview Link to heading

One Month Retrospective

One Month In Link to heading