Entry: Weeknotes 2025-05-18

blog/content/posts/weeknotes-2025-04-06.md

@@ -19,14 +19,3 @@ Thankfully, the bulk of the work of adding OIDC tokens to Gitea Actions had alre
 Other than that:
 * I've been enjoying playing around with [Vercel](https://vercel.com/home)/[Next.js](https://nextjs.org/) after a highly-respected ex-colleague recommended them (hi Dustin!)
 * I've put a bit more effort into "EDH ELO", the [webtool I've been tinkering with](https://gitea.scubbo.org/scubbo/edh-elo) to rank my Magic: The Gathering Commander playgroup's decks from match results. Kinda tempted to combine the two and "_Rewrite It In ~~Rust~~React_" :P
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blog/content/posts/weeknotes-2025-05-18.md

@@ -0,0 +1,48 @@
+---
+title: "Weeknotes: 2025-05-18"
+date: 2025-05-18T16:02:14-07:00
+tags:
+  - AI
+  - Homelab
+  - Information-Management
+  - Reading
+  - Vercel
+  - Weeknotes
+
+---
+Wow, have I really been at Vercel for three weeks? Time flies when you're learning fast!
+<!--more-->
+# What I Did
+
+## At work
+
+Ramping up at Vercel has taken the majority of my mental and emotional energy. It is _radically_ different from anywhere I've worked before - the culture is electric and energizing. For someone accustomed to red tape, foot-dragging, and pessimism, it's been actually unsettling to be surrounded by so much optimism and positivity - it reads to me as disingenuous. Which, to be clear, is a "me-problem", not a comment on that behaviour - I knew going into this role that it would afford me opportunities to [learn about new technical areas]({{< ref "/posts/weeknotes-2025-04-06#move-to-vercel" >}}), but it turns out to be giving me an opportunity for emotional growth as well!
+
+On the technical side, though - a coworker was finally able to convincingly articulate to me why monorepos _are_ an attractive pattern, even in the presence of good service-creation tooling and extractable CI/CD workflows. The core point I'd been missing was - monorepos do not _force_ all components (services/packages) to depend on the same version of an (internal or external) package, they merely _encourage_ it. In situations like a zero-day drop[^fastest-upgrade-possible], or a hairy breaking-change for an internal package[^test-run-upgrade], you can deliberately break that lockstep for as long as you want, and then return to it once out of the critical migration portion. Now that I know that that's not a drawback, the other advantages actually look way more compelling. Thanks for the explanation, Brandon!
+
+I must say, it's refreshing to work at an actual "_technology company_", as opposed to "_a company that works with technology_" (which, if you're charitable, could be a description of LegalZoom). On Friday I spent ~20 minutes hacking around with bash-scripting to implement some functionality in our [build tooling](https://turborepo.com/), before realizing that is already came built-in. Contrast this with LegalZoom, where a Principal Engineer declared _in 2024_ that "_we've moved our workloads to Kubernetes - **we're in the future**_"[^dudo-sucks]. Quite.
+
+## Personal Projects
+
+I finally caved and bought myself a top-notch GPU (Nvidia RTX 5090) so that I could self-host some AI-related tooling to get a better understanding for how it works. And as a side-effect, hopefully Factorio's Gleba will be able to render on something above minimal settings now! Sadly my motherboard is so old that the brand-spanking new case I bought (the old one literally wouldn't fit it in!) isn't operating at peak spec - the RGB fans on front and back aren't lit, and there's no mobo connector for USB-C port on the front - but it's still a lovely little toy.
+
+![An RTX 5090 will not fit into a case from 2005](/img/rtx-5090-does-not-fit-1.jpg "An RTX 5090 will not fit into a case from 2005")
+
+![Second View](/img/rtx-5090-does-not-fit-1.jpg "Second View")
+
+![Less RGB than I would like, but still...purty...](/img/rtx-5090-in-new-case.jpg "Less RGB than I would like, but still...purty...")
+
+Along the way I've learned how to set up WSL, which was surprisingly painless, aside from [making services available over the network](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/49835559/access-a-web-server-which-is-running-on-wsl-windows-subsystem-for-linux-from-t) - seems like the out-of-the-box solution is only available on Windows 11, which my CPU doesn't support, so I have had to use [this workaround](https://gist.github.com/daehahn/497fa04c0156b1a762c70ff3f9f7edae?WT.mc_id=-blog-scottha) script (via [Scott Hanselman](https://www.hanselman.com/blog/how-to-ssh-into-wsl2-on-windows-10-from-an-external-machine)). [Obsidian](https://obsidian.md/)'s been invaluable for note-taking!
+
+I also took the opportunity to buy a(nother) PowerEdge R430 off a friend who was moving to New York, so my homelab is even more over-scaled. Soon it'll be time to buy a new switch...and then a new rack...
+
+And finally, I started reading [Changing Minds](https://www.amazon.com/Changing-Minds-Computers-Learning-Literacy/dp/0262541327) after seeing a recommendation in a [Lobste.rs](https://lobste.rs) comment section. Quite the time capsule of seeing what people in 2001 thought computers could be!
+
+# What I'll Do
+
+* Continuing to ramp-up at Vercel will likely keep taking the majority of my time and energy - which, honestly, is as it should be. I'm wary of my tendency to over-commit to work, but - at least at-present - this seems to be a place that will reward investment-of-effort, and I'm excited to be stretched and challenged and learning again. I finally understand what my friend Jeff was talking about when he was talking about the pleasurable aspects of working somewhere whose values align with yours!
+* That said, I'd love to make the time to start a toy project on next.js/Vercel, to get a better understanding of the products' strengths.
+
+[^fastest-upgrade-possible]: Where you actively want all consumers of a package to upgrade to the fixed version, without waiting to update all at the same time.
+[^test-run-upgrade]: Where you might want to work closely with a partner team to "test-run" the migration rather than updating all consumers at once
+[^dudo-sucks]: In fairness, that particular guy was engaged in enthusiastically brown-nosing our Chief Architect at the time, so (as was so often the case with anything he said) you can't really be sure whether he meant it, or was just being manipulative. I'm not sure which would reflect worse on him.

blog/content/uses/_index.md

@@ -33,7 +33,7 @@ This is a ["Uses" page](https://uses.tech/), detailing some of the tools and oth
 
 ### Hardware
 
-* Three Raspberries Pi, and a PowerEdge R430 that I got cheap and refurbished thanks to a tip from a friend.
+* Three Raspberries Pi, a PowerEdge R430 that I got cheap and refurbished thanks to a tip from a friend, and another PE R430 that I bought off that same friend when he moved from the Bayeria to New York City.
 * [iX Systems](https://www.ixsystems.com/) [TrueNAS R-Series](https://www.truenas.com/r-series/), 64GB RAM, 1x1.9TB SSD, 7x6TB HDD, 4xEmpty for expansion. Probably overkill, but I'd rather give myself some room to grow than have to deal with data migrations and repooling regularly!
 * [Sysracks 12U 35" Rack](https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B09KK678CN).
 * [Quotom Mini PC](https://qotom.net/) w/ 8GB RAM, 64GB SSD, running [OPNSense](https://opnsense.org/) as Firewall and Router
@@ -41,13 +41,16 @@ This is a ["Uses" page](https://uses.tech/), detailing some of the tools and oth
 
 ### Software
 
+#### Utilities/Infrastructure
+
 * [k3s](https://k3s.io/) is a super-simple way to install a Kubernetes cluster on "_something as small as a Raspberry Pi_". I'm sure it's probably missing some of the bells-and-whistles of the more fully-featured installations, but I've never hit any limitations that mattered to me. You can see the setup in the [pi-tools](https://github.com/scubbo/pi-tools/tree/main/scripts-on-pi)[^out-of-date-naming] repo that I use to configure my homeserver. Configuration and installation is [just these two lines](https://github.com/scubbo/pi-tools/blob/main/scripts-on-pi/controller_setup/1.sh#L67-L70), though there are another 70 or so lines of installing convenience resources (which I should really migrate to a full GitOps location, but eh, who has the time?)
   * [Helm](https://helm.sh/) and [ArgoCD](https://argo-cd.readthedocs.io/en/stable/) are invaluable for defining and deploying Kubernetes applications, respectively.
   * I have really enjoyed what tinkering I've done with [cdk8s](https://cdk8s.io/) for Infrastructure-As-Code, but haven't used it in earnest yet. I have been able to use some [jsonnet](https://jsonnet.org/) to achieve some [pretty terse application definitions](https://gitea.scubbo.org/scubbo/helm-charts/src/branch/main/app-of-apps/edh-elo.jsonnet), though.
+  * [`democratic-csi`](https://github.com/democratic-csi/democratic-csi) is an astonishingly "plug-and-play" dynamic storage provider for Kubernetes. With the exception of the one time I had to restart all the pods when they got into a funky state after a power outage took down the whole cluster, I often forget that it's there.
 * [Gitea](https://about.gitea.com/) as my [Git forge](https://gitea.scubbo.org); hosting repos and Docker images, and executing workflows with [Gitea Actions](https://docs.gitea.com/usage/actions/overview)
-* [Vault](https://www.hashicorp.com/en/products/vault) for Secrets management
+* [Vault](https://www.hashicorp.com/en/products/vault) for Secrets management (See [here]({{< ref "/tags/vault" >}}) for some examples of what I've done with it!)
 
-More detail to follow! TL;DR - Grafana, OpenProject, Jellyfin, Crossplane, [democratic-csi](https://github.com/democratic-csi/democratic-csi), KeyCloak, HomeAssistant.
+More detail to follow! TL;DR - Grafana, OpenProject, Jellyfin, Crossplane, KeyCloak, HomeAssistant.
 
 [^ai-optin]: Yes, I know it was opt-in. It still indicates decision-making that I don't want to support.
 [^out-of-date-naming]: the naming is somewhat out-of-date, since I've added a non-Pi PowerEdge to the cluster - but hey, all engineers know there's nothing to permanent as a temporary name!