Picture yourself at a bivouac just outside the city, a temporary refuge where you managed to get away for a little fresh air and a change of scene. Like all cities of its size, and like the relentlessness of rust, it never sleeps. And until this first night of freedom, it has kept you awake all too often too. Your reprieve from urban vigilance wasn’t granted. You had to build it yourself. You started small, like this camp in the woods. Not even a tent, just enough warmth and a breathable mesh for shelter from the bugs. ...

I lost some momentum on my bootcamp journey in recent days. Both “embers” in the flame panel have gone dim (see banner), signifying I haven’t submitted any work for two days. I had made it a point of pride that those embers were never lost. So, what’s really going on? I was, and still am, working on Chapter 5: Storage. The lessons so far: CH 5 - Lesson 2 (Goose Migrations) - Postgres SQL schema migrations CH 5 - Lesson 3 (SQLC) - Code generator from SQL commands CH 5 - Lesson 4 (Database Review) - Quick notes about dialects and a pop quiz CH 5 - Lesson 5 (Create User) - We have the SQL defined, now wire up the API handler CH 5 - Lesson 6 (Create Chirp) - CRUD operations for “chirps” (where I am now) I’d already been down the Goose and SQLC road in a previous course, so I thought I’d blast right through this part. ...

I’ve been taking a break from gainful employment, and filling the craving for tasks by doing Boot.dev courses. My bio on the site currently reads: Rusty CS masters grad from Canada, minor in psych to help understand HCI. Taking boot camp to cure 5 years confinement to OPS, and prolonged exposure to business 4GL and wishful approaches to AI. I’ll unpack the snark in other posts. Today I thought I’d say a quick thanks to Boot.dev for their work, and to offer the perspective of an aging coder and what I’m getting from the online, gamified bootcamp experience. ...

(From my hand-written notes.) Do I choose to use AI today? Efficiency for me but not for thee or society – Unknown Broligarch I find this decision to be more urgent and more difficult every day. On the one hand, not choosing to employ AI in solving a particular problem decreases the range of candidate solutions I can practically explore as a solo programmer. On the other hand, the opportunity to effortfully stretch my own organic neural net and thereby expand its future utility should not be squandered. ...

While reading Hugh Howey’s Shift I was jolted out of the novel by three thoughts in quick succession. The first was an awareness of mild discomfort in my eyes, typical in this ragweed season. The second was a rush of fear of imminent loss – will this crispness fade again? And the third was a response – no, these are my eyes now. This week I had my first cataract surgery; the next is early in September. They fixed the worse one first. I’m on my fourth day adjusting to the improvement, and I couldn’t be more grateful and relieved. After two years of gradually fading vision, I’m able to see without glasses or contacts. ...

TL;WR If you’re moving your software development practices to Kubernetes, please don’t rush the packaging work (i.e. the charts, operators, and pipelines). It might seem that spending time here is a waste of effort, but rushing this part — or worse, working backwards from manually deployed customer environments — will cause expensive delays when you can least afford it. A Dubious Analogy In just about every business, the pressure to deliver can be immense. There are powerful incentives when deliveries go well, and there are serious consequences when they go wrong. The software business is no different, and sometimes a change of shipping strategies can lead to unpleasant surprises. ...

Today I learned that LocalStack 🔗 was a thing. If you need to learn the AWS API on a budget, or if you have AWS in your CI/CD pipeline and you want to test your deployment code, this looks like an amazing resource. Note to self: this is the first “TIL” post, but I really should be making a habit of it. I come across amazing stuff several times a week. ...

I finally bought a single machine that lets me grow a little cloud at home. My intention is to use it to look into various DevOps tools, including some that don’t fit well on a typical PC. The banner image shows the 40 virtual cores I now see in htop. The image was taken a couple of seconds after simultaneously rebooting five VMs, each with 4 CPUs and 8GB RAM. ...

TL;WR Hosting a Windows Remote Desktop in your home over the Internet is a risky business, particularly in this era of botnets and ransomware. My father used to invite other volunteers from church into his desktop to help with the books, and I finally convinced him to transition off his PC and into various commercial platforms. Each of those platforms had their pros and cons. Years have passed, and now I think I can bring the service partway back. Even better, this solution opens the door to some affordable experimentation mixing cloud-hosted and self-hosted services. ...

In this post I discuss some of the potential usability issues when working with static site generation. ...