Blog

We were on the verge of greatness, we were this close

Reinvigorated after initial failings with LXD, I looked to creating a Scaleway Kosmos Kubernetes cluster. The setup would allow me to have a managed control plane while providing my own compute for the workers. It seemed like the best of both worlds, but unfortunately I encountered an issue that while might be fine for some to continue on, would prove to be a dead end for me.

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No plan survives first contact with the enemy

Previously I wrote about how I planned to uplift my self hosting setup to a new standard, implementing new tooling and strategies to enable me to enjoy more of my hobby. That effort is still ongoing however, I’ve felt I needed to change strategies on the fly. Indeed, I wrote about how I wanted to uplift my infrastructure layer to use LXD as a hypervisor along with LXC to enable a transition away from Docker and Docker Compose. I am still working on that transition, but instead the final destination is to my first tech love, Kubernetes.

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My new plans for my hobby for this year

I know that I have written about this previously on this blog, but I think everybody goes through their own cycles of highs and lows. Personally, there’s been a lot more lows as of late. Things for the most part of this year have not been feeling amazing, primarily due to events in work. When you have a hobby that is closely related to your work, things can suffer when that compartmentalisation starts to fail. And other things going on in my life meant that generally, things were quite sad feeling.

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I have seen the light

Test Driven Development is a topic I have been petrified of for quite some time. It is something that I knew was praised as a development strategy, rightly so as many would argue. I struggled for a long time to even conceptually understand how TDD even worked. The slightly more naive version of brain simply could not cope with the idea of trying to test something before knowing something even existed. Put plainly, how could I assert 2 + 2 = 4 when I did not even have the code to add 2 and 2 together in the first place?

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Sticking with my existing website for now

Well, I am writing from my lovely hotel in London, before I jet off towards Iceland. I know I wrote previously on how I was going to work on a brand new website to enable me to create more content. While I was working on that and making quite good progress, including migrating all my old content, I decided to stop the project. The primary reason in the end came down to cost. In general in my life, I’ve embarked on a finance and expenditure journey with the aim of building a state of financial observability. I have goals in terms of home ownership, buying a car. Plus in general I was just spending a lot more than I should month to month. So I am hoping to see at least the initial fruits of that work in the next few months.

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We don’t like noise

This will probably be a short one, written while I wait for a hair cut. To help enable my new self hosting efforts I looked to re image my Rapsberry Pis. I needed to upgrade the SD cards in some of them, to 64GB and a thing on my to do list is to introduce some file shares. As part of the upgrade I decided to move towards Ubuntu Server 22.04 LTS.

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Two unrelated events lead to annoyance

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A new perspective

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Will launch it when I know how many story points it will be

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