For years and years I’ve been using Jekyll as my static site generator of choice, mostly because I like their templating engine and I’m a fan of Ruby as a programming language. I’ve been experimenting with Hugo as well, but it never really clicked for me. Well, until I found the perfect theme for my needs. The same theme is now used here and on the toot.community blog so I wanted to set mine apart a little bit by adding banner images on some posts. Downloading an image from Unsplash and manually resizing it wasn’t an option though - I need things to be frictionless when I want to add a blog entry.

If you’re serious about scaling your company you should stop doing DevOps teams. I realise this is probably a controversial opinion and one I’m most likely almost alone in thinking, but it’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot as of late.

I’ve been a Vim user for as long as I can remember, but in the last few years VS Code kind of took over as the defacto choice for us DevOps engineers. VS Code is great at offering all kinds of plugins that should, in theory, make life a little easier. It’s funny actually, because plugins are the sole reason I never quite got into using Vim fulltime. To me, plugins in Vim just added to the complexity of remembering all of the keyboard shortcuts and quite frankly, the many ways of installing a plugin didn’t help me make sense of things either.

But then Vim 8 was released.

The end of the year or your own birthday are both for reflection on the days and months that came before. We try to look back on all the things that went right and the things that maybe could’ve been better. The highs and the lows, the moments where we experienced stress, where we felt love. We try to make new resolutions for the year ahead. But sometimes we fail to notice trends as the years go by quicker and quicker.

One of the most well-known patterns in infrastructure is having an internal load balancer in front of backend services like application servers. When you’re migrating your workloads to say AWS Fargate it’s easy to just carry over that same pattern because, well, it works. But, as with all things in the cloud, internal load balancers cost money and add complexity. When you’re just migrating to using containers for the first time, adding complexity to an already steep learning curve might not be the best way to go about things.

I’ve been an avid user of various Linux distributions for 22+ years now and I will forever love everything about it and what it brought me. I have my entire carreer built on Linux and open source software. I’ve also known about BSD for about as long, but I never quite got into it, until now. I’m as much a minimalist as I am a nerd and I love simple software that does one thing well. I want all of my software to Just Work, no hassle or needless features added. After coming across OpenBSD.ams I decided to read up on OpenBSD and its goals.

Ever since this COVID-19 thing hit I’ve been working from home non-stop. That’s almost a full year of working remotely and being fully in charge of my own productivity. To be honest, I could keep this going forever - I’ve never been more productive in my life.

The last few months have also been perfect to optimize certain aspects of my work, the most important one being information processing. I’ve been horrible at keeping track of todo items before since I could never make it stick. Due to WFH I had the time to create a system for myself and I’ve never been more productive, stress-free and happy.

My system hinges on categorizing all of my information into 4 silo’s: articles, todo items, quick notes and knowledge. Let’s go through them one by one.