iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

This happened to me way too often. Love it when you can look back in time and discover why something didn't work then. samkhawase.com/blog/bug-arc...

samkhawase.com

Bug Archeology: Solving a decade-old Swift/C++ mystery

Using an LLM to solve a decade-old Swift/C++ bridge bug I never fully understood

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Karn Wong @karnwong.me · 28/09/2026

Writing means you have to refine what's in your head and express it so other people can understand. Probably just me, but using your own words makes what you want to say more authentic - because it comes from you, it's how you want to express. vickiboykis.com/2026/08/12/w...

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Karn Wong @karnwong.me · 24/09/2026

That time when I had to juggle multiple fronts, if you don't book my calendar right away, someone else might get that slot, and you'll have to reschedule again. It's easier to ask for the time then cancel later if you don't need it. staysaasy.com/book-the-mee...

staysaasy.com

Book the Meeting Before You Need It

Book recurring time blocks that exist only for as-needed, cross-functional meetings.

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Karn Wong @karnwong.me · 21/09/2026

I like python, it's the first language that I'm proficient in, used it for a lot of stuff, learned a lot along the way. But in 2026 sometimes other languages are better, in certain areas. Use what's right for the job, don't get too attached. Happy coding! menno.io/presentation...

menno.io

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Karn Wong @karnwong.me · 17/09/2026

That feeling when everything goes wrong and deep down you know it's going downhill from here on out. Document, document and document. I like history but I don't want to do archaeology. hazelweakly.me/blog/mother-...

hazelweakly.me

Mother of All Outages | Hazel Weakly

Y’all ready for a story about one of the wildest fuckups production outages I ever took part in? Buckle up; we’re going for a ride far, far away from any...

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Karn Wong @karnwong.me · 03/09/2026

Slides for my agent sandbox talk is up: speakerdeck.com/kahnwong/pyt.... I also wrote a post about this at karnwong.me/posts/2026/0....

speakerdeck.com

Python Developer Day 2026 - Demystifying Agent Sandbox

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Karn Wong @karnwong.me · 27/08/2026

AI can do a lot of things, but it's a probability machine. Just because most people think something is true doesn't make it true. Do your own due diligence, trust but verify. And fundamentals will get you a long way, at least you'll spend significantly less time to pick up new concepts.

karnwong.me

Yes, you still need to know fundamentals even with AI

Coding with AI gets stuff done faster. For some areas where I understand how things work but never applied it before, AI can help me realize it, which is great. The rate at which I crank out personal....

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Karn Wong @karnwong.me · 24/08/2026

Because having a data platform isn't enough. Even when it can scale well, peopleware is different. It requires different approaches when it comes to managing different team size. Failing this, your system won't be running smoothly, either technical or squishy human realm. dagster.io/blog/introdu...

dagster.io

A Practical Guide to Building Data Platforms That Grow with You

Discover how to design and scale data platforms with clarity and confidence. Learn from real Dagster users and practical examples in our free eBook, Scaling Data Teams.

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Karn Wong @karnwong.me · 20/08/2026

Replaced my previous o11y stack with Coroot, love it because most features work out of the box. Storage backend is Clickhouse, which means it won't break easily. karnwong.me/posts/2026/0...

karnwong.me

Coroot revisited

Discover how Coroot simplifies Kubernetes observability with ClickHouse storage, zero-config flamegraphs, deep Postgres/Redis insights, and automated alerting.

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Karn Wong @karnwong.me · 17/08/2026

Proxmox is great for managing VMs, but then you'll have to dedicate a full node to it. There are other solutions, with their own pros and cons. My favorite is Nomad + QEMU, and at least for my workflows it's easier to manage persistence and turn the VMs on/off compared to KubeVirt.

karnwong.me

Virtual machines setup for homelab

A practical look at homelab VM setups using KubeVirt, Proxmox, Nomad, and VirTofu.

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Karn Wong @karnwong.me · 13/08/2026

Aaaaand this is what happens when the lower stack relies on c. Partly why I find using linux full time easier because I can repro the ci build steps locally without going through emulation on mac.

nesbitt.io

The C-Shaped Hole in Package Management

System package managers and language package managers are solving different problems that happen to overlap in the middle.

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Karn Wong @karnwong.me · 10/08/2026

Getting an AI-generated reply but from a human who forwarded a question to an AI is quite jarring. I would think it's a bot, but then this is an actual human who I've had prior interactions before. I want to talk to humans, then there are humans pretending to be bots. It's wild.

nomeatproxy.com

No Meat Proxy

AI is a tool. You shouldn't be.

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Karn Wong @karnwong.me · 06/08/2026

A password alone isn't secure enough to protect your laptop. Disk encryption is the next step. Slight overhead, but you'll sleep better at night.

karnwong.me

Password isn't enough to protect your laptop

Why a laptop password isn’t enough—and what disk encryption adds when your device falls into the wrong hands.

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Karn Wong @karnwong.me · 30/07/2026

It would be unimaginable back then to have a single database driver that can work across multiple runtimes. 2026 is great.

columnar.tech

dbc | The package manager for modern database drivers

Install dbc, then use it to install ADBC drivers.

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Karn Wong @karnwong.me · 23/07/2026

Just because it's a container doesn't mean attackers can't do damages to your system. It's possible to obtain cloud credentials through a container shell. It's not enough to use containers, you should also harden security. For a start, use distroless image to remove shell access.

some-natalie.dev

Container Escapes 101

Welcome to Container Escapes 101 at the AppSec Village at DEF CON 33!

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Karn Wong @karnwong.me · 20/07/2026

Using passkeys means I don't have to remember passwords, and it's faster to log in this way! Also great for when you use a dummy profile to log into a video conference app for presentation 👀

karnwong.me

Make logging in easier with passkeys

Is traditional 2FA eating up your time? Discover how Passkeys (WebAuthn) let you log in securely without entering a username, password, or OTP code every day, while keeping your online accounts safe.

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Karn Wong @karnwong.me · 13/07/2026

Let LLM go wild and you might end up with a giant hole in your system's security, among other bad things that can happen. Run LLM-generated code in a sandbox for better sanity and security 🔒

karnwong.me

What are (agent) sandboxes useful for?

Homepage and blog by Karn Wong

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Karn Wong @karnwong.me · 06/07/2026

There's nothing wrong with using AI, but in the end YOU are still the one responsible for its output. The code works doesn't mean it's secure. And AI sometimes use a hacky solution, you gotta be able to catch them!

charitydotwtf.substack.com

AI demands more engineering discipline. Not less

If you lived through the shift from handcrafted server pets to immutable infrastructure, you should sense something oddly familiar about what's happening now.

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Karn Wong @karnwong.me · 02/07/2026

Gave a talk a while back about vm access. Mostly about common operations and how things can go wrong. This is a generic practice, so even if you're not on Azure it's still applicable.

speakerdeck.com

Global Azure 2026 - Securing VM Access On Azure

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Karn Wong @karnwong.me · 01/07/2026

I'm not against using LLMs, but I'm not okay with using LLMs to write docs intended for humans. By that point the question will be "is this an actual intention" or "LLM had a go at it".

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Karn Wong @karnwong.me · 29/06/2026

You can use eBPF in conjunction with OTel! Don't forget to filter out what you don't need, otherwise the storage would balloon up, and there will be too much noise.

karnwong.me

Observability with eBPF and OTel

Use eBPF and OpenTelemetry together for zero-code-change auto-instrumentation, combining generic trace capture with fine-grained custom instrumentation.

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Karn Wong @karnwong.me · 26/06/2026

Found silken tofu in the fridge. Also an avocado was ready to eat. Yup, cubed them and added shoyu, perfect!

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Karn Wong @karnwong.me · 22/06/2026

Serverless is convenient and I love it, given the right context. In some cases, it can be more expensive than an always-on deployment. But serverless misconfiguration can cost you millions!!! And cautionary tales are in order serverlesshorrors.com

serverlesshorrors.com

ServerlessHorrors | Home

Stories you never want to feel on your own skin

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Karn Wong @karnwong.me · 04/05/2026

Everyone wants to excel at what they do, but on the other side it's very lonely, especially when they want to vent but there's no one else sharing the same context as them. People want them to stay where they are to solve hard problems. Let's not forget they are also humans too.

spacedaily.com

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Karn Wong @karnwong.me · 30/04/2026

Gotta make sure your apps don't have funny security holes. Pentest engineers might not be on the same page as software engineers, and that's normal, they speak different languages. Good news is as long as you are open and try to communicate, things will work out alright. Humans are very resilient.

softwaresecured.com

Why Pentests Break Engineering Workflows

Why pentests disrupt engineering workflows and what a more actionable, engineering-first approach looks like for remediation and security maturity.

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Karn Wong @karnwong.me · 16/04/2026

TLDR; Listen in on what's going on between an agent and LLM 👀

karnwong.me

LLM tracing with MLflow AI Gateway

Karn Wong's blog

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Karn Wong @karnwong.me · 13/04/2026

I got started with humanities. Turns out I used it for software engineering, and that was before I put two and two together. Wild, isn't it. Once you can see that systems are communication patterns there's a lot of things you can play with to get desired results.

blainsmith.com

Humanities in the Machine - Blain Smith

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Karn Wong @karnwong.me · 02/04/2026

Recently worked on a terraform project with k8s and argocd, need to run ssh port forwarding and kubectl port forward to init workspace. With flox, I only need to activate the shell and it'll spawn up these services automatically. Automatic tear down if exit the shell. Nifty!

karnwong.me

Development environment setup with flox and direnv

Karn Wong's blog

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Karn Wong @karnwong.me · 30/03/2026

Used to work with classical models and got curious how neural networks perform for tabular data. For science.

karnwong.me

Classical models vs neural networks for tabular data

Karn Wong's blog

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Karn Wong @karnwong.me · 26/03/2026

Things is never done after deploying a data pipeline. Post-deployment is where the fun starts. Amidst army of users who use and request your data and app teams that are always ready to change upstream schema, the real challenge is how to make your pipelines still operational.

ssp.sh

A Diary of a Data Engineer

You ingest data. You model it. You transform it. You serve it. Someone asks for a change. Everything breaks. You rebuild. This is the loop. It was the loop in 2005 with SSIS and star schemas. It’s the...

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Karn Wong @karnwong.me · 01/03/2026

Recently collaborated with a friend, turns out he uses his $previousCompanyEmail for git email. Then I run `git log` on my friends' public repos, yup more $workEmail and $studentEmail. This post is an attempt to tell people that it's possible to use different config for personal/work.

karnwong.me

Multi-account git setup

Karn Wong's blog

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Karn Wong @karnwong.me · 26/02/2026

Using containers is great, but it's better if you remove shell access to prevent an attacker doing funny stuff with your system. Otherwise you'll be losing both time and money.

karnwong.me

Reduce workload attack surface with distroless image

Karn Wong's blog.

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Karn Wong @karnwong.me · 23/02/2026

Slides from my talk at AgentCon Bangkok. Interop is key, and don't forget to monitor prod 👀

speakerdeck.com

AgentCon Bangkok 2026 - How to Stay Sane in the Age of Agents

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Karn Wong @karnwong.me · 16/02/2026

Ops is easy, if you use platforms that already abstract the hard parts for you. The real fun? A single mistake can bankrupt you. Gotta be smart about your cloud spends.

reddit.com

From the devops community on Reddit

Explore this post and more from the devops community

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Karn Wong @karnwong.me · 03/02/2026

Slides for National Coding Day 2026@Bangkok, TH. Mostly about why you should refactor, and things that are hard to rectify once they went to production. Also for those who's curious about AI impact, fret not. As long as AI can't bridge the gap between IT and Finance for FinOps we are safe.

speakerdeck.com

National Coding Day 2026 - Software Evolution: The Complete Lifecycle

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Karn Wong @karnwong.me · 26/01/2026

Because you can't call it a day after releasing an agentic product. Gotta plug security holes as well, and because data exfiltration isn't fun.

advent-of-ai-security.com

Advent of AI Security 2025

A friendly, step-by-step Advent calendar of AI security risks and hands-on examples for practitioners and curious engineers.

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Karn Wong @karnwong.me · 22/01/2026

You can't stop students from using AI. But you can make them think very hard about it, because wrong answers with AI help means you lose more points. This I like!

ploum.net

Giving University Exams in the Age of Chatbots

Giving University Exams in the Age of Chatbots par Ploum - Lionel Dricot.

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