"To be human" is informed by the tools we use: it's the distinguishing characteristic of our species. Better thinking, and action, depends on our ability to recruit outboard systems to lever the best part of ourselves into effective result.

In this month's The Inner Loop we examine methods, and tools, for better thinking and doing, from Kubernetes control planes as state control loops for a fleet of robots to open-source journals with a wiki-twist.

Use control planes to keep your houseplants watered or

pilot a swarm of robots

You may think Kubernetes is just a container orchestrator but while it serves in that capacity for most of us, at its heart, it is a control loop for reconciling state. The KCP project takes this to its logical conclusion by jettisoning the pods and deployment model for a pure, CRD-only, API server. The result is a REST CRUD API for application development with none of the K8s cruft.

Design isn't just for frontenders 

For those lucky enough to have programmed BASIC as a child on their Commodore 64, computing and its concepts emerged fluidly, effortlessly. For everyone else, there's Prof. Gregor Kiczales who teaches programming software programs using design methods. ⅄

"Design is the process of going from a poorly desgined problem to a well-designed solution."→

Better thinking with better notebooks

A tool I've adopted for better thinking is Logseq, which is structured as a daily journal so you can just dump your thoughts and return to structure them later. The way you structure and re-surface good ideas is by interlinking blocks, binding them in association just like how your brain works 🧠.

Ambient intelligence, whenever, wherever→

Garden's Config Templates are an Internal Developer Platform ready-to-vend

If you're ready to embark on the journey to create your very own Internal Developer Platform, Garden lets you vend groupings of service configurations and infrastructure-as-code as key-values to your developers so they only worry about what size database or what number of replicas to deploy.

The juice is worth the squeeze 🍊→

*Photos for this edition are provided with credit to the author's wife, Emily Quinlan, taken when she was but a wee lass of 16. Thank you, Emily! 💘

🌸 Cabinet of Curiosities

What your author is thinking of this week:

• Vladimir Nabokov was a Russian author who, after writing his first nine novels in Russian, moved to the US, mastered the English language, and went on to write his next nine novels in English. A recurring motif found in Nabokov's Pale Fire is the image of a white fountain. This motif reappears in the film, Blade Runner 2049, during the Baseline Test recited by the android K, played by Ryan Gosling.

• The Japanese TV series, "Old Enough!", from 1991, follows a group of children through the streets of Japan as they go on errands for the first time.
• Create cute 8-bit pixel games about cats or build your company an observability dashboard (featuring cats?) with Python game engine, Pyxel.
• Catch Garden co-founder Thor Sigurdsson on The State of Developer Tooling for K8s, streaming live on the KubeSkills Youtube channel today, July 18th, at 12PM CDT / 7PM CET.

✍🏻 By Tao Hansen

I am happiest when I help others. That’s why I’d love to help you wherever you are in your container development story, even if you’re brand new. Please reply to this email or reach out on Twitter if you find containers scary, unapproachable or just would like to rubberduck 🦆. And don't forget to join our Discord where you can chat with our community and get help with any bugs or feature requests ✨