Never thought I would pay for search
Besides say, the obvious point in my life of trying to minimise my exposure to Google, search is one of those things that’s rather hard to avoid. Sure, for years I’ve had DuckDuckGo (DDG) as my default, but I was just as accustomed to doing the !g bang to just send my search to Google. It always felt like I couldn’t quite have full confidence in the results for DDG. Maybe it was because I knew behind the scenes they were using Bing’s indexes. So, even if I searched something with DDG, if I did not find what I felt I was looking for, I would immediately revert to Google Search.
Taking a look back
I thought I might try my hand at an end of year review, primarily for myself as I want to be able to look back at the year to see what I’ve done. I likely won’t share this broadly on social media since it’s a bit more personal. But I’m still happy to publish something so if one manages to stumble upon it, fair enough.
etcd fail, backup fail, Claude win?
Back in September, I performed some routine updates of my infrastructure. I have this nice, Saturday morning routine where I get my coffee, play some chill music and go about running updates across all my hosts, any pending software updates on tools like Home Assistant and also update any client workloads. It’s quite nice, I could automate a lot of this with say, unattended-upgrades. But, I like the routine and I also like being around for an upgrade in case it goes south. With my Kubernetes cluster, there’s obviously the host operating system itself, then the cluster software. In my case, K3s.
Return on investment while moving to Grants in Tailscale
One of my favourite blog posts and generally, favourite thing I did, was use test driven development with my Tailscale ACL. I’m pretty much a noob when it comes to software engineering, even though it was the basis of my degree, but I read a lot about it and have great colleagues who have decades of experience in it. One thing that always came up, was test driven development. If you’re not familiar, the very very basic idea is that when writing code, you write your test first. That test, will fail and you subsequently write code that will have the test pass. You would then refactor this code as time goes on, following the pattern of red, green and refactor. Or rephrased slightly; failing test, passing test, refactor.
life always has other plans
When I wrote last, I talked about how I had some new plans after my self hosting infrastructure woes were resolved. That was back in March, so only about nine months later am I circling back to report on how, none of that really happened. Not that I need to justify to anyone why plans never quite started, but back in around April I started the process of buying my first home. That naturally, consumed quite a lot of my time and brain bandwidth. Thankfully this has culminated in now being sale agreed on a new build apartment, which naturally I’m over the moon about! I’ll be writing another sort of standalone blog on that entire process, as I find that there is not a whole lot of information on new build apartment buying in Ireland. So, maybe what I’ve experienced could be of help to someone. The process is far from being done, at the time of writing I’m still waiting on a few things before everything is formalised. But hopefully that gets sorted soon so I can start to feel a lot more excited about the process.
A letter to myself on why I do this
This is a bit of a different blog post and also feels weird to write. Almost like I am trying to justify this hobby to myself, because it is a hobby, right? Something you gain enjoyment from? My running theory is that I am actually a masochist because who would continue to persist with something after it causing so much pain? This does allude to some future blog posts that I hope to get out soon, which continue my previous writing spells theme of “things break, I lose data, I get sad, but its fine”.
Using methods from Slow Productivity to better plan work
Now that I feel I can take my gaze away from my infrastructure, what do I want to work on now? I am going to do a follow up post, perhaps a standalone piece on my website where I really deep dive into the why’s of my self hosting journey. I touch on it at points throughout my posts and I feel like having a condensed piece that goes over everything, will be good for me to just get it all written down and to have a resource to refer to when I get asked the question “well why are you a lunatic?” haha
Trying my best to tell myself it is indeed solved
The dust has very much settled at this point. I’ve sort of sat and stared for a while as I can’t quite believe the stability I’ve experienced after so much instability. It’s been about two or so weeks since I took action once again on the hardware front, and it’s been all quiet on this front. I mentioned previously acquiring new hardware, but as it turns out that was not the issue. But it did lead to discovery of what seemed to be either the root cause or at least partner in crime of my woe.
Probably not, but I’m just letting the dust settle
While I took a break from my current endeavours for a while, I jumped back in quite quickly. I’ve since taken a more deliberate break. This weekend gone, besides some routine patching I did literally nothing self hosting related and it was honestly glorious. But it’s time to go over what steps I took after the realisation of having to lose an entire Kubernetes cluster, yet again, and why I feel / hope that the end is approaching in this story arc.
