I’m off until January 20th. It’s the longest amount of consecutive time off I’ve taken in over a decade, which has seen the birth of three of my five kids. I will be doing nothing, with great purpose and intensity.
… That’s a lie, technically, but I’m going to approach almost no computers for the better part of the month for reasons other than entertainment. See you on the other side, crustaceans. Happy holidays if applicable, and a happy new year
thank you. It’s one of multiple places I’m interviewing with right now, and I’m getting close to the end… I’ve been here before though so not letting myself get too optimistic until I have an offer in-hand.
IIRC you were job hunting too recently right? How is/did your hunt go(ing)?
I was! I ended up moving sideways from engineering to IT in the same company instead, and after six months am still quite happy with it. A friend described it well as “boring but satisfying”, which is apparently something I need more of in my life.
I’ve been doing December Adventure all month, working a little bit reach day on personal projects.
I’m getting closer to an install release of MyCmd, trying to finalize and features and her continuous integration set up with GitHub Actions. I’m also separating out the project task runner inside of it into a separate project, so I’m doing some design work on what I want that to look like.
I love AoC, but I think I really like this idea. Even if I don’t do it for December, I think it would be a neat idea to pick a month, maybe one that’s not overly busy, and do this. Thanks for the share and the inspiration!
For some inane reason I decided now was a great time to grind down old plaster in the basement before re-plastering later. That will happen whenever the plumber feels like gracing me with their divine presence in order to reroute some pipes that are in the way. With their history of spotless work etiquette I pray it’ll happen before end of 2025. It’s not likely.
After carefully sealing the area off, use all the dust collection, air filtration and ventilation available with full PPA there’s now a fine layer of dust covering every surface in the entire house. So cleaning. A lot of it.
When that is said and done, somehow push Arcan 0.7 out before heading to 38c3.
Simply showing up should be table stakes for plumbers, electricians, and builders, but sadly that is not my experience. Is finding someone else an option? Depending on where you live, and the pipes in question, you could also do it yourself… (Not something I’d recommend lightly, but if the alternative really is that it might not be in 2025…)
I am not afraid of DIY for most anything else, but the plumbing for heating specifically here is not something I’d mess around with since a. it’s cold right now, b. it’s at the bottom of the system with no way to section it off, any attempt needs to drain/refill/vent/etc.everything so you want to get it right at the first time, c. the pipes are old, pre-any surviving standard. But it’s in the middle of nowhere and there’s basically the one guy.
I go back to work Thursday 2nd. So this is my last complete off week. I’ll have to do some fravelling and family things, but hopefuly I can get something done.
Unfortunately, I am temporarily demotivated to work on my main side project. I have worked in “as fast as possible” mode and I have accumulated more tech debt than I’d like. I should write a second scraper for that, but getting the first one right was more effort than I expected, so I think I’ll need to take a break from that to recover my motivation.
That leaves two secondary side projects:
Trying to create a local tech community. I participate in a few communities, but none really local- and that’s a gap. I’m bad at social dynamics, so this is doomed to failure, but I want to try- I think I can also create a “blueprint” that others could use, even if it’s just for the technical part.
Scraping Google News RSS feeds. They are very nice because they have a lot of newspapers and they do story unification. I already can scrape and dump to a database (chdb, although chdb has been a bit different to what I would like), I’d like to do further consolidation, filtering, scoring, etc.
(Any opinion is welcome! I’m actually facing a bit of decision paralysis!)
Looking forward to where you’ll get to with creating a local tech community. I’ve long wanted one in my area which isn’t professionally driven. I’d love an in-person community that has the principles of lobste.rs, especially around no self promotion.
Portland, OR! There’s some local tech community, but it’s either professional or smaller hobbyist spaces mostly centered around traditional hackerspace things like electronics, 3d printing, etc. Which I’m also into, but it’s not meaty computing discussion for the most part.
Last weekend was my partner’s family reunion/big birthday party and it went really well! I’m counting that as my christmas celebrations since no other family is nearby, and our friends are planning a party on New Year’s. So I have today off to recover and then I work the rest of the week, which ought to be quite soothing since absolutely nobody else will be around. So I can get some data migrations done while nobody is around to worry about them being half-finished or distract me with other requests.
It is still going, but should be done at the end of the year! 3 of 4 teams have been migrated successfully and the last one is doing a lot of Important And Chaotic Stuff, so I wanted to wait until sometime when they were between projects. On the whole, Gitlab is a big improvement over Atlassian tools, especially for CI and repo management. Migrating tickets from Jira is easy enough with a bit of customization to someone’s random python script, though not perfect. Engineers seem to like it, project managers seem to like it a bit less ’cause the tools for measuring work instead of doing work are just less polished and developed. But on the whole they are still getting stuff done.
Pain points: Handling permissions and meshing them with our AD setup is a gigantic nuisance, their SAML integration for shuffling permissions back and forth is functional but not exactly smooth. Still not sure that going with gitlab.com was the right move vs. self-hosting, though it has generally treated us well apart from permissions. If anyone knows of any good companies that sell managed private Gitlab instances, let me know ’cause figuring out all the pros and cons is on my to-do list for 2025.
Oh, also we need a way to host Debian packages that’s less expensive and painful than JFrog Artifactory.
My experience with self hosting is that it sucks if you don’t do it right, and there’s a million components. So, gitlab.com is probably better or at least not worse.
I generally find artifactory Debian repositories to be quite reasonable. What were your pain points with them? The Terrible Upload Form?
There is one thing that Artifactory does that nobody else does. They allow you to host a Docker Registry on the same port as other resources using a different sub path in the URL.
Oh, for actually distributing stuff Artifactory is very solid. But as an admin managing different repos for multiple software groups, to handle permissions and so on it’s clunky and the UI crashes a lot and there’s no good error reporting that I’ve found so far, and all in all it’s just a giant millstone to manage. So every time you have to actually touch something it’s a 45 minute ordeal to figure out where the hell it is again, how to tell it to do what you want to do, and then test to see which assumptions I got wrong and figure out how to correct them. It’s just very unpleasant. The docker registry thing is neat but we’re already shifting to use Gitlab for our docker registry because, well, you can actually click on a thing and see all the docker images it has and where they came from.
The real reason though is that JFrog is hiking up the licensing costs by a literal order of magnitude, and it’s not worth it for us to pay that. You can’t just assume the software market in general is gonna grow 10-20% every year anymore, but the investors still want to be paid that. Actually looking at their annual reports (look for 10-K forms, section “consolidated statements of operations”) it appears JFrog has actually been operating at a loss for at least 5 years, so I’m a little sympathetic. But we’re a small company and it would be cheaper for me to do nothing in my job except personally burn software updates to DVD’s and fly to various places to deliver them.
Christmas with the family (kids are at the best age for it!). Maybe hack around a little more with my OpenBSD VPS (using Caddy for personal projects, want to switch everything back to httpd)
Then, if I get a free moment or two, continue playing through Dragon Quest 11 for the first time.
I am trying to survive the holidays, yet another season with little money and large holiday parties. Besides that, I’m hoping that I’ll have the energy to chug along on my gameboy emulator or maybe my TUI browser project. This is also probably a great week to start going on walks…
I keep up with my day job throughout - this is the most reliable chance during the year to actually get caught up on things without the users adding new things each day!
Mostly working. Picked up lots of holiday shifts for the big four, with some time off in between some of the shifts. I’ve got plans for a single family holiday get-together on Christmas Eve, but that’s probably it.
I’m doing the SDF’s plan9 bootcamp. One session in and I can already tell that it’s super neat.
Here’s the bootcamp page: https://sdf.org/plan9/
Here’s a recording of the first session from a previous cohort: https://toobnix.org/w/j5S5e5op913KtJNE6tdvW3
SDF is really cool if you like big old machines.
I’m off until January 20th. It’s the longest amount of consecutive time off I’ve taken in over a decade, which has seen the birth of three of my five kids. I will be doing nothing, with great purpose and intensity.
… That’s a lie, technically, but I’m going to approach almost no computers for the better part of the month for reasons other than entertainment. See you on the other side, crustaceans. Happy holidays if applicable, and a happy new year
Christmas with my loved ones.
Then, the whole family will all be heading to the 38th Chaos Communication Congress in Hamburg #38C3 :-)
I am so jealous that you get to go. And with the whole family! Enjoy :-)
Thank you, Stefan. Happy holidays to you and your family :)
be sure to wrap the babies well in tinfoil!
Job interview today - tech assessment. I have a cold so that should make it interesting.
Rest of the week maybe take home challenge from a job prospect if things go well.
Making cookies and pretzels with my daughter for the holidays, and having a very family filled Christmas with our kids and all 4 grandparents.
EDIT: Job interview went amazing! Very happy. Still not at the offer stage yet but 🤞
Good luck with the interview!
thank you. It’s one of multiple places I’m interviewing with right now, and I’m getting close to the end… I’ve been here before though so not letting myself get too optimistic until I have an offer in-hand.
IIRC you were job hunting too recently right? How is/did your hunt go(ing)?
I was! I ended up moving sideways from engineering to IT in the same company instead, and after six months am still quite happy with it. A friend described it well as “boring but satisfying”, which is apparently something I need more of in my life.
That’s really great to hear it worked out for you! Congrats.
Glad to see that you rocked the interview. 💪
I’ve been doing December Adventure all month, working a little bit reach day on personal projects.
I’m getting closer to an install release of MyCmd, trying to finalize and features and her continuous integration set up with GitHub Actions. I’m also separating out the project task runner inside of it into a separate project, so I’m doing some design work on what I want that to look like.
I’m also still chugging along with my December Adventure: https://alper.nl/dingen/2024/12/december-adventure/
It’s been very on and off with lots of other stuff (like starting ADHD medication) going on as well right now.
I love AoC, but I think I really like this idea. Even if I don’t do it for December, I think it would be a neat idea to pick a month, maybe one that’s not overly busy, and do this. Thanks for the share and the inspiration!
No problem! I am glad I came across the concept this year. It’s been incredibly motivating and engaging.
love the idea of December Adventure!
Aiming for an agreeable amount of family, food and wine. Always a risk of excess of any or all the above this time of year.
For some inane reason I decided now was a great time to grind down old plaster in the basement before re-plastering later. That will happen whenever the plumber feels like gracing me with their divine presence in order to reroute some pipes that are in the way. With their history of spotless work etiquette I pray it’ll happen before end of 2025. It’s not likely.
After carefully sealing the area off, use all the dust collection, air filtration and ventilation available with full PPA there’s now a fine layer of dust covering every surface in the entire house. So cleaning. A lot of it.
When that is said and done, somehow push Arcan 0.7 out before heading to 38c3.
God Jól.
Simply showing up should be table stakes for plumbers, electricians, and builders, but sadly that is not my experience. Is finding someone else an option? Depending on where you live, and the pipes in question, you could also do it yourself… (Not something I’d recommend lightly, but if the alternative really is that it might not be in 2025…)
I am not afraid of DIY for most anything else, but the plumbing for heating specifically here is not something I’d mess around with since a. it’s cold right now, b. it’s at the bottom of the system with no way to section it off, any attempt needs to drain/refill/vent/etc.everything so you want to get it right at the first time, c. the pipes are old, pre-any surviving standard. But it’s in the middle of nowhere and there’s basically the one guy.
I go back to work Thursday 2nd. So this is my last complete off week. I’ll have to do some fravelling and family things, but hopefuly I can get something done.
Unfortunately, I am temporarily demotivated to work on my main side project. I have worked in “as fast as possible” mode and I have accumulated more tech debt than I’d like. I should write a second scraper for that, but getting the first one right was more effort than I expected, so I think I’ll need to take a break from that to recover my motivation.
That leaves two secondary side projects:
Trying to create a local tech community. I participate in a few communities, but none really local- and that’s a gap. I’m bad at social dynamics, so this is doomed to failure, but I want to try- I think I can also create a “blueprint” that others could use, even if it’s just for the technical part.
Scraping Google News RSS feeds. They are very nice because they have a lot of newspapers and they do story unification. I already can scrape and dump to a database (chdb, although chdb has been a bit different to what I would like), I’d like to do further consolidation, filtering, scoring, etc.
(Any opinion is welcome! I’m actually facing a bit of decision paralysis!)
Looking forward to where you’ll get to with creating a local tech community. I’ve long wanted one in my area which isn’t professionally driven. I’d love an in-person community that has the principles of lobste.rs, especially around no self promotion.
Count me in! I’ve been working on this for a good bit of the last year - it’s slow but rewarding work (somewhat emotionally taxing too.)
Oh, that’s cool. Where are you basing it?
Portland, OR! There’s some local tech community, but it’s either professional or smaller hobbyist spaces mostly centered around traditional hackerspace things like electronics, 3d printing, etc. Which I’m also into, but it’s not meaty computing discussion for the most part.
Last weekend was my partner’s family reunion/big birthday party and it went really well! I’m counting that as my christmas celebrations since no other family is nearby, and our friends are planning a party on New Year’s. So I have today off to recover and then I work the rest of the week, which ought to be quite soothing since absolutely nobody else will be around. So I can get some data migrations done while nobody is around to worry about them being half-finished or distract me with other requests.
Glædelig jul alle sammen!
You said a few months ago that you were migrating to Gitlab. How did that go?
It is still going, but should be done at the end of the year! 3 of 4 teams have been migrated successfully and the last one is doing a lot of Important And Chaotic Stuff, so I wanted to wait until sometime when they were between projects. On the whole, Gitlab is a big improvement over Atlassian tools, especially for CI and repo management. Migrating tickets from Jira is easy enough with a bit of customization to someone’s random python script, though not perfect. Engineers seem to like it, project managers seem to like it a bit less ’cause the tools for measuring work instead of doing work are just less polished and developed. But on the whole they are still getting stuff done.
Pain points: Handling permissions and meshing them with our AD setup is a gigantic nuisance, their SAML integration for shuffling permissions back and forth is functional but not exactly smooth. Still not sure that going with gitlab.com was the right move vs. self-hosting, though it has generally treated us well apart from permissions. If anyone knows of any good companies that sell managed private Gitlab instances, let me know ’cause figuring out all the pros and cons is on my to-do list for 2025.
Oh, also we need a way to host Debian packages that’s less expensive and painful than JFrog Artifactory.
My experience with self hosting is that it sucks if you don’t do it right, and there’s a million components. So, gitlab.com is probably better or at least not worse.
Artipie https://github.com/artipie/artipie I think might fit
I generally find artifactory Debian repositories to be quite reasonable. What were your pain points with them? The Terrible Upload Form?
There is one thing that Artifactory does that nobody else does. They allow you to host a Docker Registry on the same port as other resources using a different sub path in the URL.
Oh, for actually distributing stuff Artifactory is very solid. But as an admin managing different repos for multiple software groups, to handle permissions and so on it’s clunky and the UI crashes a lot and there’s no good error reporting that I’ve found so far, and all in all it’s just a giant millstone to manage. So every time you have to actually touch something it’s a 45 minute ordeal to figure out where the hell it is again, how to tell it to do what you want to do, and then test to see which assumptions I got wrong and figure out how to correct them. It’s just very unpleasant. The docker registry thing is neat but we’re already shifting to use Gitlab for our docker registry because, well, you can actually click on a thing and see all the docker images it has and where they came from.
The real reason though is that JFrog is hiking up the licensing costs by a literal order of magnitude, and it’s not worth it for us to pay that. You can’t just assume the software market in general is gonna grow 10-20% every year anymore, but the investors still want to be paid that. Actually looking at their annual reports (look for 10-K forms, section “consolidated statements of operations”) it appears JFrog has actually been operating at a loss for at least 5 years, so I’m a little sympathetic. But we’re a small company and it would be cheaper for me to do nothing in my job except personally burn software updates to DVD’s and fly to various places to deliver them.
Christmas with the family (kids are at the best age for it!). Maybe hack around a little more with my OpenBSD VPS (using Caddy for personal projects, want to switch everything back to httpd)
Then, if I get a free moment or two, continue playing through Dragon Quest 11 for the first time.
Out of curiosity, why switch over to
httpdfrom Caddy?No real reason other than just being stubborn and wanting to use everything that’s “built-in” with OpenBSD. :P
That’s a pretty solid reason!
I am trying to survive the holidays, yet another season with little money and large holiday parties. Besides that, I’m hoping that I’ll have the energy to chug along on my gameboy emulator or maybe my TUI browser project. This is also probably a great week to start going on walks…
I’m trying desperately to catch up on Advent of Code. Some of these problems are great reminders of algorithms that I haven’t used in a long time!
Tomorrow, I’ll be smoking some beef ribs for Christmas while puzzle solving. Then Christmas and some time off.
Eating aaaaallll the food, and hopefully play some boardgames.
I finally finished my winter 3d printing project - a magnetic tile gingerbread house: https://www.printables.com/model/1110823-magnetic-tile-gingerbread-house.
The whole thing was designed using a CSG library I wrote in Rust (which currently just uses OpenSCAD, but I eventually plan on replacing that with in-process rendering): https://github.com/camshaft/printing/blob/main/gingerbread-tiles/src/main.rs
I keep up with my day job throughout - this is the most reliable chance during the year to actually get caught up on things without the users adding new things each day!
Mostly working. Picked up lots of holiday shifts for the big four, with some time off in between some of the shifts. I’ve got plans for a single family holiday get-together on Christmas Eve, but that’s probably it.
Visiting family for Christmas and then off to Hamburg for the 38th Chaos Communication Congress.
I’m doing the SDF’s plan9 bootcamp. One session in and I can already tell that it’s super neat. Here’s the bootcamp page: https://sdf.org/plan9/ Here’s a recording of the first session from a previous cohort: https://toobnix.org/w/j5S5e5op913KtJNE6tdvW3 SDF is really cool if you like big old machines.