2025–W49 #
Oh, I skipped week #48.
Backfill: For work I participated in a hackathon with a person in the same coworking space and also someone who is 5 timezones away. It worked surprisingly well though and I had fun and got to geek out on Ruby a little, though it was very tiring.
It's made me like GitHub Actions even less. Also maybe Docker. We were building a Docker container inside another ephemeral Docker container (which is standard for docker buildx bake, it seems) -- and I get that it's nice to have reproducible builds and not have your env leak in, but the outer environment is also a Docker container kicked off from GitHub Actions Runner, so it was all kind of ... isolation theatre?
Docker is (or rather, OCI images are) a convenient way to ship all shapes of software but there is a great deal to not like about the ecosystem around it and the runtime's expectations.
As for this week: on Sunday Colocataires' datacenter overheated (something I've never experienced) and all our virtualization servers shut themselves down to protect themselves. That's neat, in a way, if inconvenient. Temperatures were restored in a couple of hours and we were back. It's kind of nice when an outage isn't my fault; this is one thing we can't reasonably have redundancy against unless we have racks in another provider (which we'd need to be like 5x larger than we are now to afford).
I've spent more time with Ceph, going through an involuntary reboot of everything and not losing anything or needing to take manual action to restore stuff. I've worked on blog posts for Self-Hostember. Now there's AoC, too, but I doubt I'll get to that. Never enough time!
I did manage to start running Mothership's "Another Bug Hunt" module on Sunday, with my group who recently survived their second one-shot. We spent almost the entire session on surviving a voyage from one place to another (15 months long), fixing and maintaining the ship, almost dying of hypoxia (twice), procuring supplies and weapons (and food!) and it was ... surprisingly fun?! I really had planned on the space voyage being a small part of things and as it stood we basically just got to the planet and ended our session after like 3+ hours. It's fun to listen to your players! They seemed to have a good time (I mean, I did too, I am not put out about things not going how I intended).
I did four days of Advent of Code! It's pretty pleasant this year and I'm doing them in Rust. (yeah, I'm giving Rust another go).
One of the things that I think had held me back a little with Rust has been attempting to write "good" code from the get-go -- type safe, every Option and Result checked -- but for AoC I am .unwrap()-ing like a Cloudflare developer and it's a lot more fun. I'm also trying to use .map() and .filter() etc. but I'm not letting myself feel bad if I just declare a variable as mut and do stuff to it in a loop. So far this is going okay.
I am also relying on a language server a lot -- both with Helix and VS Code as my editor. I do not think I could be productive without them, but also if I think back to when I learned Python I always had to switch back and forth to the docs to know what methods were available on an object (or just poke around in the REPL) -- even more so with Ruby where for AoC I usually have the Array or Enumerator docs open to remind me of some method I'll need to solve a puzzle.
I also published a few days of blog posts on the Colocataires blog, along with Pawan. It's quite a bit of work but it's been fun. Resulted in absolutely zero sales but that's okay.
I am repairing a Snoopy ice-skating doll/ornament, the "Hallmark Whirling Twirling Snoopy". It's pretty well made and repairable. Maybe it's old (it's from a thrift store) or maybe I've been too pessimistic about the state of toys and stuff that's mass produced nowadays.