Posts on Ji Molloy

🚀 Scaling smarter on Kubernetes: A beginner friendly look at KEDA & Karpenter ✨

Mon, 22 Dec 2025 15:38:23 +1100

Helloo!

If you have ever run apps on Kubernetes, you will know that scaling is one of the most powerful features it gives you. But once you go beyond simple CPU-based autoscaling, things can definitely get a bit trickier.

That is where KEDA and Karpenter come in! Two really awesome open-source tools that bring smarter, faster, and more cost-friendly scaling to your clusters. In this post, we will take a beginner friendly tour of what they do, how they work, and why teams (including ours!) love them 💛

🐼 Future of Tech Mascots 🧸

Sun, 30 Nov 2025 15:02:43 +1100

Over the past few years, I have been thinking about how character culture shapes industries: from idol groups to stationery aisles, from gacha machines to cafés. And recently, I was thinking of: why aren’t tech mascots treated like real character IP? 😆💭

We already know that characters with strong story, cute design, and a sense of collectability become global icons. For example:

🐼 Pokémon where each Pokémon has a unique name, powers and personalities
🎀 Sanrio and its family of characters
🎶 BT21 and how each character represents a BTS member
✨ Chiikawa, with every character having a backstory
🌐 aespa, whose AI universe concept ties all their songs and avaters together

So… what about tech?

🎤 Giving your first conference talk 💡✨

Thu, 25 Sep 2025 20:30:19 +1200

So you have hit submit on the talk proposal and you have received an e-mail that your talk has been accepted 🎉💌! Congratulations! Yay! Now here are some tips on preparing for your very first conference talk. I’ll be sharing some of my personal experiences, which I hope is helpful.

😮 Disclaimer: My experience was with an AWS Community Days event, so every conference may run a little differently. But I hope these tips will still help you feel more confident and ready! 😊

🕸️ Service Mesh + Kubernetes 💑

Sat, 23 Aug 2025 20:42:22 +1200

If you have ever worked with Kubernetes and found yourself wondering 🤔 “How do all my services talk to each other reliably, securely, and observably without writing heaps of networking logic into my application code?”

That is exactly where a service mesh comes in. Let’s dive into what it is, how it is helpful, and why (or why not!) you might want to add one to your cluster 🚀 Let’s goooo!

🧾 kubectl apply -f 2025.yaml: Declaring My Goals

Sat, 19 Jul 2025 21:03:28 +1200

Helloo 2025! 🎉 This year, I’m taking a declarative approach to my career, because why not manage your goals like you manage your infrastructure? 😄

I like to visit my goals half way through the year 😉!

Here’s what my intentions for the year looks like:

goals:
  - certification: "One per year"
  - conferences:
      - in_person: 1
      - meetups: "a few"
  - speaking:
      - internal: true
      - external: true
team: "Kubernetes Platform"
joined: "6 weeks ago"
learning_style: ["KodeKloud", "books", "breaking things", "blogs"]

Let’s break it down together 😎

🚢 Kubernetes 101: Book Recommendations, K8s Basics with Pokémon, and Getting Started! 🐾🐳

Sun, 01 Jun 2025 15:48:25 +1200

📚 Let’s Start With a Book!

I highly recommend The Kubernetes Book by Nigel Poulton. It’s beginner-friendly, concise, and full of real world insights. It’s a great starting point when learning about Kubernetes.

🌍 Where Did the Word Kubernetes Come From?

The word Kubernetes (pronounced Q-ber-net-ees) comes from Greek, meaning helmsman or pilot of a ship ⛵. We often use K8s as a shorthand to refer to Kubernetes! This is because there are 8 letters between K and s.

🔐 No More Secrets 😎 Secure GCP Auth from GitHub Actions using Workload Identity Federation

Sun, 18 May 2025 20:55:52 +1200

In the world of CI/CD, one thing we are all tired of is managing long-lived service account keys. They are hard to rotate.. risky to store, and can lead to serious breaches if leaked! 😿

In this post, I will be showing how to set up GitHub Actions + Google Cloud Workload Identity Federation (WIF) to enable secure, short-lived authentication, with no secrets stored anywhere. 🚫🔑

🚨 The Problem with Static Secrets

It is still common to authenticate from GitHub Actions to GCP using service account keys stored as GitHub secrets:

☁ Google Cloud Next Series ☁️🔐 Building Smarter, Safer Cloud Systems Together 🛡️💻✨

Wed, 30 Apr 2025 20:17:49 +1200

Helloo! 👋 How are you?

Let’s learn more about cloud security, detection engineering, and scalable policies 🐱🚀

🔍 Detection Engineering with Google SecOps

Detection engineering isn’t just about catching threats — it’s about building a smart, scalable detection machine 🛠️. With Google SecOps, detection becomes modular, testable, and highly effective.

🧩 Composite Rules 🐐

Rather than putting every condition into a giant, brittle detection rule, Google SecOps encourages the use of composite rules. Think of them like reusable LEGO bricks 🧱: create small, atomic rules for specific behaviours, then chain them together to form higher-order detections. This lets you mix curated rules with your own custom logic to handle complex attack patterns or environment-specific edge cases.

☁ Google Cloud Next Series 🚀 From Planning to Production: How AI Agents Are Transforming the SDLC 🌐🚀"

Sun, 27 Apr 2025 16:31:05 +1200

Hellooo! 👩‍💻👨‍💻

Today, we are diving into something really exciting from Google Cloud Next 🌐 — the interesting ways Gemini Code Assist agents in Firebase Studio are helping the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC)! 🎉

🛠️ Gemini Code Assist Agents

The Gemini Code Assist agents are purpose-built to make engineers lives easier inside Firebase Studio. 🚀

Here’s what they bring:

AI Testing Agents 🧪 — helping you catch bugs and safety issues early
Inline AI Documentation 📄 — never get lost in legacy code again! Yayay!
AI Chat 💬 — have a conversation with your codebase

These agents are perfect for onboarding new team members 👥, understanding complex projects 🔍, and improving our team’s overall efficiency ⚡!

☁ Google Cloud Next Series 🚀 Building a Competitive Edge with Platform Engineering: Insights from the Experts 🎯

Sun, 27 Apr 2025 12:34:36 +1200

Heya! 👋✨ Today, we are diving into a summary from an expert panel discussion on Platform Engineering 🌟

🛠️ Platform Engineering & Developer Experience 💕

One of the biggest takeaways? Platform Engineering isn’t just all about the underlying Platform — it’s also about making life better for our engineers! 🎉

Here’s how:

Reducing cognitive load 🧹: Engineers can focus on building, not battling with underlying infrastructure!
Self-service portals 🛎️: Developers get what they need, fast and easy!
Abstracting complexities 🔍: Bye bye, confusing infrastructure layers!
Measuring engineer satisfaction 📏❤️: Keeping a pulse on happiness across all tools.
Closing the feedback loop 🔄: Turning feedback into real action and success!

In short, happier engineers = better products = happier customers! 🎉🙌

🌩️ What I Wish I Knew Before Attending Google Cloud Next 2025 🌩️

Wed, 16 Apr 2025 20:46:16 +1200

Survival tips for a techie adventure in Las Vegas 🏜️💻

Heya! ☁️ I had an amazing opportunity to attend Google Cloud Next 2025 in Las Vegas! 😮‍💨 If you’re planning to attend a similar conference in the future, here are some things I really wish I had known beforehand — and this is just the beginning! 🎉 I’ll be sharing more blog posts soon with deeper dives into Google Cloud Next 2025 🚀😎

Demystifying Modern Software Delivery: Trunk-Based Development, CI/CD, and Releases 🚀👨🏻‍🚀

Sun, 06 Apr 2025 16:16:34 +1200

Software delivery has changed a lot over the years! What’s the difference between continuous delivery and continuous deployment? 🤔

And is a feature live just because it’s deployed? 🤨

Let’s look into this together with some modern DevOps 🚀

🌳 Trunk-Based Development

Trunk-based development (TBD) is a software development strategy where everyone works from a single branch (trunk) — usually main. It’s fast, lean, and fits in modern delivery practices.

🔧 How it works:

Developers commit to main (or short-lived branches that are merged quickly to the main branch)
The main branch is always deployable
Features are hidden behind flags until they’re ready to go live 🚀

💡 Why it matters:

Trunk-based development encourages:

⏳📦 Time & Space Complexity Explained with Pokémon! 🎮🐉

Sun, 30 Mar 2025 20:19:56 +1300

When writing code, we often want to know how fast it runs ⏩ and how much memory it uses 💾. This is where time complexity and space complexity comes in! Let’s break these down using Pokémon themed examples! 🔥

⚡ Big O Notation - The Trainer’s Guide 📖

Big O notation helps us understand how an algorithm scales as the input size grows. Think of it as training a Pokémon: some level up quickly ⚡, while others take longer ⏳!

Make It Yours! 🎵 Personalising the Lyrics to Like Jennie 🎤

Fri, 21 Mar 2025 15:48:27 +1300

Interactive Personalisations to the Lyrics of Like Jennie! 🤗

Jennie is a member of the K-pop group BLACKPINK who recently released her solo album Ruby 🎧🎵

Like Jennie is a song in the new album Ruby!

In this YouTube video, Jennie explains the meaning behind the song Like Jennie - and how it can be personalised for anyone 😁!

This post is to help anyone personalise the song Like Jennie!

Enter text in the boxes below and click SUBMIT button!

Comparing Severance TV Show to Virtualisation Techniques 🧠💻

Sun, 16 Mar 2025 15:12:03 +1300

If you’ve ever watched Severance on Apple TV, you know that it’s a very interesting and addictive show that explores the concept of “severance” — a procedure that separates your work-life memories from your personal memories 🧑‍💼💼

But have you ever thought about how Severance could be compared to virtualisation techniques? 🤔 Let’s do an interesting comparison between the human mind and computer systems together, using concepts like partitioning and virtualisation 🚀

Tuckman’s Stages of Software Engineering Team Development : Lessons from T1 🏆🎮

Sat, 15 Mar 2025 16:54:40 +1300

Building a strong and cohesive team is not easy, whether it’s in software engineering or e-sports! Let’s talk about Tuckman’s Stages of Team Development, using the famous T1 League of Legends team as an example. This e-sports team has gone through all the ups and downs of team development, and their journey is a great lesson for us in the tech world.

Let’s break it down and see how T1 went from the Forming stage to the Performing stage—and why keeping your team together, upskilling, and believing in internal promotion is key to success! 🚀

Evolution of K-POP Groups : From Monoliths to Microservices 🎤🌟

Wed, 12 Mar 2025 19:09:22 +1300

K-pop has evolved dramatically over the years, with new generations of idols pushing the boundaries of what we know about the industry. If we take a step back, we can notice an interesting parallel between the growth of K-pop groups and the way we develop software 😄!

From the early days of K-pop groups like SES and Girls Generation to the global groups of BLACKPINK and BTS, K-pop groups have undergone a major transformation. This journey can be compared to the shift from monolithic systems to microservices in the tech world! 🤖💻

DevOps Fundamentals! Bread Maker Analogy 🍞

Mon, 10 Mar 2025 21:16:51 +1300

DevOps is like a bread maker 🍞🐱‍🏍 it takes a variety of inputs, processes them, and produces a final product with minimal manual intervention. Just like how you add ingredients to a bread maker (flour, yeast, sugar, etc. 🍰), DevOps involves providing code, infrastructure, and automation to produce a continuous flow of delivery. Let’s break down the 3 fundamentals of DevOps and explore some best practices using the bread maker analogy!

How AI is Helping Software Engineers : A Helping Hand, Not the Driver 🚗

Sun, 09 Mar 2025 19:59:50 +1300

The world of software engineering is constantly evolving, and so is the technology we use to build software. Artificial Intelligence tools, like GitHub Copilot, have rapidly emerged as valuable assistants in the software development process. But it’s essential to remember that AI is a tool and not the driver. It is the software engineer who remains in control, using AI as a helpful co-pilot rather than relying on it to lead and drive the way.

Level up together : Building a strong pairing culture 🥰

Sat, 08 Mar 2025 20:38:04 +1300

Why should we promote a pairing culture? 🌳

Pairing offers numerous valuable benefits that help enhance team dynamics and professional growth 🌴:

Knowledge Exchange and Growth 💚
- Mentoring and reverse-mentoring
- Accelerated skill development 💹
- Effective knowledge transfer
Team Development 💛
- Enhanced communication skills
- Stronger collaborative relationships
- Faster onboarding of new members
Organisational Benefits ☕
- Elimination of knowledge silos
- Continuous team up-skilling
- Improved project outcomes through shared expertise

As part of the PaaS team at Xero, when managing core CI/CD tooling, our team frequently encounters diverse customer requests 😎. While balancing these support responsibilities with our planned sprint work, we sometimes face challenging situations, including:

How Team Topologies relates to League of Legends 😎

Fri, 14 Feb 2025 17:11:43 +1300

How Team Topologies Relates to the Different Positions Played in League of Legends

In both software development and competitive gaming, effective team structure and collaboration are critical to achieving success. Whether you are managing a sofware engineering team or playing a game of League of Legends (LoL), how you organise your team and define roles impacts the overall performance and outcome.

In this blog, I’m going to draw an interesting comparison between Team Topologies: a framework used to define and optimise team structures in modern software engineering, and the positions in League of Legends. While one is about creating scalable and efficient software, and the other is about winning a fast-paced game, the principles of collaboration, specialised roles, and strategic alignment remain the same. If you haven’t read the book: Team Topologies yet, please checkout my previous blog post on book recommendations where it has more information about this blog and why you should read it!

Getting Terraform Certified! 🌍

Thu, 12 Sep 2024 17:43:30 +1300

Benefits 🦘

Infrastructure Automation | HashiCorp Developer

I prepared for the HashiCorp Certified: Terraform Associate certification, which is about:

Fundamentals of Terraform: The certification covers core concepts and skills related to Terraform, including infrastructure as code (IaC), basic Terraform commands, and the ability to manage and deploy infrastructure using Terraform 📝
Practical Application: It focuses on practical knowledge, such as creating and managing Terraform configurations, understanding the Terraform workflow, and applying best practices for writing and organising Terraform code ⭐

How I prepared books (~ 6 weeks)

I created a weekly schedule to study one practice exam per week. There are 5 practice exams and one final exam available which is slightly different: Terraform Fill-In-The-Blank Questions.

Book Recommendations for Software Engineers in 2024

Thu, 06 Jun 2024 17:07:53 +1300

📚 Recommended Books for Software Engineers 📚

As a software engineer, continually enhancing your skills and knowledge is crucial. Reading books that provide insights into different aspects of software development, team dynamics, and coding best practices can significantly help contribute to your professional growth.

Here are three highly recommended books that every software engineer should read.

Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps: Building and Scaling High Performing Technology Organizations 🚀

Authors: Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble, Gene Kim

Serverless Days 🥨

Fri, 24 May 2024 17:01:51 +1300

Serverless Days!

Click here to see the full agenda

I had the amazing opportunity to attend ServerLess Days. If you are working with serverless technology and would like to meet other active developers and technical leaders from across the Australia & New Zealand region, while hearing from some world-class speakers, I highly recommend attending this event!

Here is a quick recap of my learnings!!

Think, Architect, and Build Serverless Applications as Set Pieces

Speaker: Sheen Brisals

Accumulated architecture HIDES complexity
Distributed architecture SHOWS the complexity
Problem Decomposition
- Utilise serverless characteristics
  - Event-driven architecture
  - Using managed services
  - Infrastructure-as-code ♥
- Employ PROVEN patterns
  - Domain Driven Design
    - Domains and sub-domains
    - Bounded context
  - Team Topologies
    - Team ownership and custodians
  - Microservices
    - Independently releasable single-purpose services
- SUSTAIN the architecture, application and processes 🌳
  - ⬇ sustainability: Waterfall development
  - ⬆ sustainability:
    - Serverless ways of thinking
    - Evolving architecture
    - Minimum Viable Product (MVP 🌟)
    - Modular, extendable and observable product
  - Follow lean principles
  - Improve Value Stream
  - Agile & Pragmatic
  - Start SMALL and scale!
  - Evolve in ITERATIONS
  - Automate EVERYTHING 😎
  - DevOps Mindset
  - Refactor Continuously 💖
Growing talent in the team 🌻
- Enablement within the team 🌼
- Celebrating wins
- Instill ownership

Whether Serverless or Not, It’s all about how you drive your project!

Speaker: Nelly Sattari

Keywords: Accountable, Agile, Healthy and Focused
The art of impossible
- Coach - Helping individuals
- Connector - Building a healthy team
- Conductor - Driving projects
- Compass - Setting the direction
Don’t forget to connect with stakeholders
Atlas Atlassian product that is a teamwork directory. For example, every Monday we can review how the team is doing!
Making it clear what everyone’s roles and responsibilities are
Building an Agile Team
- Fixed: People, Team and Scope
- Epic ▶ Milestone
  - Incremental delivery
  - Breakdown MVP
  - Carry out within 1 to 2 sprints
- Importance of Sprint Goals ⚽
  - Achieving Sprint Goals is MORE important than shipping all the tickets
  - Each milestone could be a goal?
  - Goal setting meeting to review if the team met their goals in the previous sprint
    - Teams can answer YES, PARTIALLY or NO
    - If the sprint goal hasn’t been met, have a meeting to identify why the goals were not met
    - Other Agile Rituals include Sprint Checkpoint and Capacity Planning
💟 DATA DRIVEN LEADERS 💟
- Identifying work that is carried over multiple sprints, what are the dependencies? Why was this work not completed within the sprint?
- Measuring velocity
- Measure everything, no “gut feelings”
Connection
- Social events
- Celebrating milestones
- Recognition
- Beware of burn-outs!
Collaboration
- Providing training
- Mentoring and pairing
Data-Driven Engineer who recognises importance of Agile rituals
More team members can cause overhead
- Adding more team members doesn’t mean the team will have higher velocity
Developing self-healing / stateless / idempotent systems
Working on serverless and real time observability
Summary
- Do the simple thing first
- Small team with fast feedback loop - showcase often
- Identify risk early, shift-left and spike
- Continuously measure performance and stress test
- Isolate context boundaries (lambdas)
- Solution must prove itself correct

Using serverless functions for real-time observability

Speaker: Liz Fong-Jones

Most realtime bulk workloads benefit
- Move state from local machines onto object storage
- Shard list of objects into work units
- Parallelise object processing
- Reduce results outside Lambda afterwards
Beware the dragons! 🐉
- Avoid latency-insensitive batch workloads (cost)
- Avoid tiny workloads (set-up latency)
- Check cloud provider limits, state your intentions (capacity planning)
- Test cross-compilation including profiling to avoid performance issues with switching architectures

Getting AWS Solutions Architect Certified! 🚀

Thu, 25 Aug 2022 17:04:04 +1300

Benefits of getting AWS Certified ✨

Please note that the exam content has changed on 29th August 2022 (SAA-C03), so the content and resources I share in this post may be out-of-date! ☕

I prepared for the AWS Solutions Architect - Associate certification, which is about:

Designing a solution by using appropriate AWS services and by following architectural principles based on requirements
Providing implementation guidance based on best practices to the organisation throughout the workload lifecycle

I got exposure to the wider AWS services than the ones I use regularly in my day to day job 😎 also, I gained a deeper understanding around AWS services and how they interact and fit together. I really enjoyed understanding various use cases and coming up with solutions, and getting a taste of what a role of a Solutions Architect may be like 🌟!