Fun times are over

It was fun while it lasted, but it couldn’t last, such is the nature of borrowed things. Perhaps the time of reckoning is still ahead, or perhaps it is already upon us. Was it a brief excursion into other possible ways of being, or a journey towards a new becoming? A vacation or a mission? Somewhere down the road, the traveller looks in the rear-view mirror and does not recognise the path travelled. The sensation is disorienting, for this is what it means to be lost. It was fun while it lasted, but the time has come to return. Not...…

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Consul on my Pis

A cluster of things What is a “cluster”? When do things become more than a collection, and turn into something different? Something else? I am accustomed to thinking about things in terms of homogeneous bags of resources. Whittling down the context a bit more, we’re usually talking about homogeneous bags of compute resources like “CPU”, “storage”. Some reference to the attempts to accurately describe all kinds of compute resources in terms of abstract concepts may be useful, and you would be forgiven if you thought I was referring to Kubernetes here. I have no idea how that word will sound...…

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Home-made Hashicorp Pi

What the hell just happened It’s been a long year for all of us. As someone who used to take pride and satisfaction in writing about their work on the internet, I look back at the void I’ve produced with mixed feelings. On the one hand, I’ve achieved several goals at work, but haven’t had been able to write about it publicly. On the other hand, the things I did for myself have been so reduced in scope to things that only find useful that I have doubted this whole year that anyone would be interested in reading – including...…

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Tripping over k8s

🍅 1 - Jumping right in We’re using Rundeck to manage operations tasks, and we’ve chosen Kubernetes as a deployment platform. The reasons for this are not relevant to this post, so we have to take them for granted for now. Other pieces of tooling that we should take for granted are Jenkins for the continuous integration pipeline, Helm for the packaging model and Spinnaker for the continuous deployment pipeline. I’m writing this post in order to reason about and hopefully resolve issues encountered in writing the helm chart. I will also be using the pomodoro method to keep pace...…

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Considerations on a physical office

New job, new life A few months ago, a major change happened in my life: a career change and a move of house coincided. The new job is as part of a small, entirely remote team, working on improving the integration, delivery and operations of a suite of applications. This is a major change in a way – a totally different space, intended both as physical as well as business space. In other ways, it is the thing I’ve been preparing for, for the last 5 years. I’ve learned and even taught the theoretical aspects the vague thing we call...…

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