The Nerdy Sixty | (51/60) Missing September Days | Solution
Solution: Understand the calendar switch of 1752: 11 days were omitted when the British Empire adopted the Gregorian calendar.
🥅 Blamelessness Is Psychological Safety with a Pager
Blamelessness is not about avoiding accountability. It is about creating enough psychological safety for teams to review incidents honestly and improve together. Using a team sports replay metaphor, this ELI5 article explains why resilient teams learn faster when they analyze the whole play instead of blaming the most visible person.
Letters from the Future
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A launch post for Letters from the Future, a satirical book of memos, incident reports, tickets, and open letters from workplaces where AI keeps doing exactly what it was told.
Early Computing Adventures – Where Debugging Meant Bug Zapping
Arc 6 of The Nerdy Sixty takes us back in time — when programmers punched cards, editors played Tetris, and the first bug had wings. History, hilarity, and high ASCII await.
The Nerdy Sixty | (50/60) Daytime Protocol | Solution
Solution: Use the “Daytime” protocol by connecting to port 13 of a time server (like time.nist.gov) via telnet or netcat to get a timestamp.
🕵️ Postmortems Are Detective Stories for Nerds
Postmortems should work like detective stories, not courtroom trials. This ELI5 article explains how good incident reviews follow clues, reconstruct timelines, and improve systems without hunting for culprits. Learn why blameless postmortems help SRE and incident response teams uncover real causes and build safer, more reliable production systems.
The Nerdy Sixty | (50/60) Daytime Protocol | Challenge
Use the “Daytime” protocol by connecting to port 13 of a time server (like time.nist.gov) via telnet or netcat to get a timestamp.
The Nerdy Sixty | (49/60) Internet via Pigeons | Solution
Solution: Identify RFC 1149: “A Standard for the Transmission of IP Datagrams on Avian Carriers” – a humorous specification for sending network traffic via pigeons.
✈️ Runbooks Are Emergency Cheat Sheets
Runbooks are not textbooks. During an incident, engineers need short, visual, actionable guidance—just like airplane emergency cards. This ELI5 post explains why nobody reads long documentation at 3 a.m. and how better runbooks improve incident response, reduce stress, and protect uptime when production systems start failing.
The Nerdy Sixty | (49/60) Internet via Pigeons | Challenge
Identify RFC 1149: “A Standard for the Transmission of IP Datagrams on Avian Carriers” – a humorous specification for sending network traffic via pigeons.
The Nerdy Sixty | (48/60) ASCII World Map | Solution
Solution: Telnet to mapscii.me to get a zoomable OpenStreetMap in ASCII art in your terminal.
⛈️ Incidents Are Storms, Not Moral Failures
Incidents are stressful, but they are not proof that a team is bad. Like storms, outages happen when conditions combine in complex systems. This ELI5 post explains blameless incident response, why blame is counterproductive, and how resilient teams prepare for bad weather instead of arguing with clouds.
The Nerdy Sixty | (48/60) ASCII World Map | Challenge
Telnet to mapscii.me to get a zoomable OpenStreetMap in ASCII art in your terminal.
The Nerdy Sixty | (47/60) Weather in Terminal | Solution
Solution: Use curl with wttr.in to fetch an ASCII-art weather forecast for your location or specified city.
🍽️ Your System Is a Restaurant Kitchen
Modern systems are like busy restaurant kitchens. Different services handle different tasks, dependencies act like ingredients, and bottlenecks slow everything down. This ELI5 guide explains microservices, system dependencies, and production bottlenecks in a simple and memorable way using the metaphor of a dinner rush in a restaurant.
The Nerdy Sixty | (47/60) Weather in Terminal | Challenge
Use curl with wttr.in to fetch an ASCII-art weather forecast for your location or specified city.
🍕 SLIs, SLOs, and Error Budgets Explained with Pizza Delivery
SLIs, SLOs, and error budgets define reliability in modern SRE teams. Using a simple pizza delivery metaphor, this article explains why perfection isn’t required, how reliability targets work, and why error budgets help teams balance innovation and stability without burning out.
The Nerdy Sixty | (46/60) Audible Ping | Challenge
Use the ping option -a (audible) which causes the terminal bell to ring on each ping response.
LifeLines: Map Your Story on a Shared Interactive Map
LifeLines turns places, milestones, and memories into an interactive map. Add stations from one or multiple lives, connect them visually, and share or print the result.
Thunder & Mercy – A New Hip Hop Journey of Faith, Hope, and Truth
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*Thunder & Mercy* is the new album by *Messenger of Light*, blending Christian hip hop with cinematic energy, honest struggle, and deep hope. From spiritual warfare to grace, forgiveness, eternity, and Christmas, the album offers powerful lyrics, diverse sounds, and a bold message of faith for everyday life.
