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

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.

I’ve interviewed DevOps candidates who couldn’t rename 30 files at once. They had AWS certifications. They had Kubernetes experience. They had years on their resume. But when I asked them to automate a simple task without Google, they froze. ​ Here’s the truth most people won’t tell you: Many "DevOps engineers" today are just professional button clickers. They know where the buttons are in the AWS console. They can copy-paste commands from Stack Overflow. But they don't know how to use Bash properly. They are not able to write shell scripts. ​ This single weakness is keeping them stuck at $80K while others make $200K doing the same job title. ​ You Are Using Your Computer Wrong Think about how you interact with your computer right now. You point. You click. You drag. You drop. You repeat the same 47-step process every time you need to do something. Computers were invented to free humans from repetitive labor. Instead, we’ve turned them into elaborate pointing-and-clicking machines. Every time you click something, you’re doing a computer’s job for it. Every time you manually repeat a task, you’re trading your time for laziness. Every time you can’t automate something, you reveal a fundamental gap in your skill set. And hiring managers see it immediately. ​ The Power That Cannot Be Faked When I was a Junior DevOps Engineer, I watched a senior solve in 10 seconds what took me 2 hours. He didn’t install a special tool. He didn’t use a fancy GUI application. He typed a single line of bash. My jaw dropped. I asked him immediately if he could teach me. That moment changed my career. ​ The command line provides capabilities that no graphical interface can match. Rename 500 files based on patterns? One line. Find every log file containing a specific error across 20 servers? One line. Transform data, filter it, and pipe it to another tool? One line. Automate a deployment that takes 45 minutes by hand? One script. This kind of power cannot be replicated in a GUI. Ever. Once you experience it, you can never go back to clicking.