Posts

Looking back at my new year’s resolutions for the last decade or so, taking up photography has been on the list virtually every year. I’ve tried in the past, which went ok for a time, but as smartphones ate the world I eventually lost interest in lugging around a camera and drifted away from it.

It’s been developing for a few years now, but 2020’s pandemic really helped me realize how much I love to be outdoors, in the woods, on the coast, and in the ocean. Last January, with photography once again on my NY resolutions list, I decided to try again.

I’ve been using zsh for about 15 years but despite this I’ve noticed lately I’m pretty inefficient at editing commands in particular, mostly because I don’t have a clue about emacs keybindings. I am however very familiar with vi bindings but my config was never properly setup for zsh, I couldn’t search history like I could in emacs mode and I’ve been blundering along in this state for too long. (turns out it was just because the bindkey’s were not declared after doing bindkey -v to go to vi mode, oops)

The Kubernetes Operator Pattern has a lot of appeal and I’ve led a team that has written and maintained several over the past three years. We’ve learned a few things in the process and I wanted to write up some thoughts around when you shouldn’t be writing an operator.

I spent some time recently revamping my zsh setup, something I haven’t really spent any dedicated time with since about 2006. In transitioning to oh my zsh I discovered fasd, a command line productivity booster. Essentially it tracks the files and directories you work with in your terminal, and ranks them by “frecency”, both frequency and recency. You can then reference them with short, usually single character aliases and fuzzy matching.

Examples here will assume the suggested default aliases from the github readme. A couple parts are only available with zsh, but most of fasd is perfectly usable with bash as well.

For my work on OpenShift I wanted a way to use my local workstation as a test cluster with vms for a master and multiple nodes. Ideally it would be possible to quickly teardown and rebuild the whole cluster, but I also want reliable hostnames (and IPs) across each rebuild. This post outlines a way to do this with Fedora (25 as of writing) and Vagrant.

The key to getting Fedora configured such that the hostnames and DNS will work is this post by Dominic Cleal. Follow these steps and your vms can request any *.example.com hostname, libvirt’s DNS server will assign IPs and your host OS can resolve them as well, however they’re still not going to always map to the same IP.