Categories

Jacar categories — explore the topics A rocket whose eyes follow your cursor.
Software Development

Corporate Low-Code: Retool and Appsmith for Internal Tools

Retool and Appsmith cut internal tool development time from weeks to days. Retool leads the commercial SaaS market with polished components and enterprise permissions; Appsmith brings open source self-hosting at low or zero cost. Low-code works for dashboards, forms, and simple workflows, and breaks on complex logic or highly custom interfaces.

Methodologies

Flux CD vs ArgoCD: Which to Choose for Your Platform

Flux CD and ArgoCD are the two CNCF-graduated GitOps tools for deploying to Kubernetes with Git as the source of truth. ArgoCD offers a centralised visual UI that manages several clusters from one instance, while Flux is a set of Kubernetes-native controllers with built-in image automation. Neither choice is wrong: it depends on your team and use case.

Tools

Podman: Containers Without a Daemon or Root

Podman is the Docker alternative with no central daemon and no root privileges required. Each container runs as a direct child process of the launching user, with rootless support since version 1.0 in 2019. If a container escapes, it does not gain host root. When Podman makes sense and what real differences to expect.

Technology

Trivy and Grype: Container Image Scanning in CI

Trivy and Grype are the two leading open-source tools for container image scanning in CI/CD pipelines. Both detect CVEs in OS packages and language dependencies with less than 5% coverage difference. Trivy stands out for IaC scanning; Grype natively integrates the SBOM workflow with Syft.

Technology

The Grafana Stack: Loki, Tempo, and Mimir for Open Observability

The Grafana stack combines three open source projects: Loki for logs, Tempo for traces, and Mimir for metrics. All three keep data in object storage (S3/GCS) with a minimal index instead of indexing everything like Elasticsearch, which cuts cost sharply at high volume and lets you correlate metric, log, and trace from a single Grafana panel.

Technology

nerdctl: A Lightweight Docker Alternative Over containerd

nerdctl is a Docker-compatible CLI that talks directly to containerd, the standard Kubernetes runtime since dockershim was removed in 2022. It adds rootless support by default, encrypted images with ocicrypt, lazy-pulling, and native CNI. It fits best where containerd already runs, though Docker Engine still wins on advanced Compose and Swarm.

Artificial Intelligence

Vector Database Comparison: Qdrant, Pinecone, and Weaviate

Qdrant is the pick when full control and performance in self-hosted setups matter most; Pinecone wins for fully managed SaaS with zero operations; Weaviate stands out when native embeddings and hybrid search built into one pipeline add real value. This comparison covers architecture, quantisation, filtering, and RAG use cases to help you decide based on budget and control needs.

Tools

Efficient PC Management with Microsoft PC Manager

Microsoft PC Manager is a free, official Microsoft tool that brings temporary-file cleanup, Windows startup management, one-click access to Windows Defender, and a visual disk-usage map into a single panel. It runs on Windows 10 and Windows 11, but it does not replace a full antivirus or dedicated data-recovery tools.

Tools

RustDesk Remote Desktop Tool: Professional Solution

RustDesk is an open-source remote desktop tool released under the AGPL-3.0 licence, with more than 113,000 stars on GitHub. It offers end-to-end encryption, clients for Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS and Android, and the option to run your own signalling server with Docker instead of relying on RustDesk's public infrastructure.