• Summer Project – Home Lab Refactor

    As with any good engineer, I cannot leave well enough alone. My current rainy day project is reconfiguring my home lab for some much needed updates and simplification. What’s Wrong? My home lab is, well, still going strong. My automation scripts work well, and I don’t spend a ton of time doing what I need…

  • ArgoCD panicked a little…

    I ran into an odd situation last week with ArgoCD, and it took a bit of digging to figure it out. Hopefully this helps someone else along the way. Whatever you do, don’t panic! Well, unless of course you are ArgoCD. I have a small Azure DevOps job that runs nightly and attempts to upgrade…

  • Upgrading the Home Network – A New Gateway

    I have run a Unifi Security Gateway (USG) for a while now. In conjunction with three wireless access points, the setup has been pretty robust. The only area I have had some trouble in is the controller software. I run the controller software on one of my K8 clusters. The deployment is fairly simple, but…

  • Migrating to Github Packages

    I have been running a free version of Proget locally for years now. It served as a home for Nuget packages, Docker images, and Helm charts for my home lab projects. But, in an effort to slim down the apps that are running in my home lab, I took a look at some alternatives. Where…

  • Platform Engineering

    As I continue to build out some reference architecture applications, I realized that there was a great deal of boilerplate code that I add to my APIs to get things running. Time for a library! Enter the “Platform” I am generally terrible at naming things, but Spydersoft.Platform seemed like a good base namespace for this…

  • Supporting a GitHub Release Flow with Azure DevOps Builds

    It has been a busy few months, and with the weather changing, I have a little more time in front of the computer for hobby work. Some of my public projects were in need of a few package updates, so I started down that road. Most of the updates were pretty simple: a few package…

  • When “as code” makes a difference

    I spent a considerable amount of time setting up my home lab with a high degree of infrastructure and deployment “as code.” Googling “Infrastructure as Code” or “Declarative GitOps” will highlight the breadth of this topic, and I have no less than 10 different posts on my current setup. So what did all this effort…

  • A Quick WSL Swap

    I have been using WSL and Ubuntu 22.04 a lot more in recent weeks. From virtual environments for Python development to the ability to use Podman to run container images, the tooling supports some of the work I do much better than Windows does. But Ubuntu 22.04 is old! I love the predictable LTS releases,…

  • My Very Own Ship of Theseus

    A while back, I wrote a little about how the “Ship of Theseus” thought experiment has parallels to software design. What I did not realize is that I would end up running into a physical “Ship of Theseus” of my own. Just another day On a day where I woke up to stories of how…

  • Moving to Ubuntu 24.04

    I have a small home lab running a few Kubernetes clusters, and a good bit of automation to deal with provisioning servers for the K8 clusters. All of my Linux VMs are based on Ubuntu 22.04. I prefer to stick with LTS for stability and compatibility. As April turns into July (missed some time there),…