Makefiles Finally Made Sense to Me

I’ve been studying the Node Readiness Controller codebase lately. It’s a Kubernetes project and like most Kubernetes projects, it has a Makefile. Makefiles are usually large files spanning over 300+ lines, so my immediate reaction to it was to close it and come back to it later. This weekend, I did some research on what Makefiles are and why are they needed. Now, I do have a good idea on what they are, so I decided to document my understanding in case I need to come back to it later. ...

August 26, 2026 · 5 min · Arnab Nandi