Sunday, Dec 28 05:30:09 AM CET 2025 2025 has gone by so fast. It was the first year where I had 0 income from being an employee. All of the money I’ve made in 2025 has come from my own businesses, and it feels amazing. And I want as many people as possible to experience the same. This will be my guiding light for the next year. In this newsletter I will share my plans for what is coming, and I think you will like it. I’m going to help a lot of people for free. Autonomy Many of you have heard me talk about the importance of autonomy in my recent video called “Why I Refuse to Use Windows”. That video has received 85.000 views at the time of writing of this email. Eighty five thousand people have spent a few minutes watching me talk about Linux and the importance of autonomy in life. Some of those people watched the video from beginning to end. And they commented. These comments have had a profound effect on me. You see, when I made this video, I had no expectation that this would get so much attention. I had no idea that it would resonate on a deep level with so many people. In that video I wanted to do something different from what I’ve been doing so far. I wanted to share more of the WHY behind everything that I do. The results surprised me. The comments I received on this video were of a completely different nature. People sharing their stories and expressing their deep appreciation for what I was teaching them. Several people made the commitment to become a DevOps engineer and joined KubeCraft after watching that video. It became clear to me that I had more to give to the world than Kubernetes tutorials. The Sovereign Craftsman On January 1st 2025 my YouTube channel had 32.000 subscribers. As I write this, I have 72.000 subscribers. That means I have more than doubled my subs, and I’m getting close to 100K subscribers. When I combine the counts from all platforms, I now have 115.000 followers.

Docker Hardened Images used to be locked behind Docker Business and Enterprise plans, typically costing teams $200–300 per developer per year. Now they are open source and available to everyone. This matters because most container CVEs come from base images, not application code. Teams paid to reduce that noise or accepted the risk. By removing the paywall, Docker is pushing secure base images from “enterprise upgrade” to baseline. https://www.docker.com/products/hardened-images/

We’ve all been there — bookmarking useful links, switching devices, and eventually losing track of URLs we meant to come back to. While working on other projects, I realized I was still relying heavily on tutorials whenever things got more complex in Kubernetes. @Mischa van den Burg newsletter last week was the push I needed to step away from guides and actually test whether the theory holds up in a real environment. I decided to deploy Linkding, a self-hosted bookmark manager, on K3s via Rancher Desktop. This helped me move past “Hello World” and understand how production-style applications really behave in Kubernetes: - Self-healing: Watching pods get recreated and replaced - Networking: Seeing how Services expose applications locally - Persistence: Using PVCs so data survives pod restarts - Stateful workloads: Understanding why data needs special handling in K8s By treating this as a real problem to solve, concepts like deployments, volumes, and pod lifecycles finally clicked. If you’re learning Kubernetes, I highly recommend picking one small, real-world tool and deploying it this week. It’s one of the fastest ways to make the theory stick. 📦 Project repo (manifests included):https://github.com/Griffindeetox/linkding-kubernetes

This post is for everyone who's still on levels 1 to 3. Go on, say hello :-) Anyone who's level 4 or higher is only allowed to use the reply function. Let's see if this works here -Mischa

Thanks alot for all the encouragement from the last time I posted here. I pressed and was able to install Arch Linux successfully. I went on to install Vivaldi, Obsidian and tmux. I have a 30 day plan to learn basic linux but I'm not sure if it is the right thing to do and what exactly to concentrate on to get myself prepared ready for using devOps tools