James Brechtel
43d3891bee
This seems to be a really nice balance of control and getting me to write some more elisp.
14 KiB
- circumlocuting
- The problem with large companies
- Simple CSS frameworks - 2024-09-30
- Let people fail - 2024-09-25
- Just what is it you do here?
- Managing Expectations
- HTTPS @ Homelab
- Multi-room audio setup
- vi-editing everywhere
- AWS Cloudwatch Metric Filters
- The default page
- The default page with a sidebar
- The default page with TOC and sidebar
circumlocuting
Hello,
Here's what I've been thinking about
The problem with large companies
Organizing people is a difficult problem which only gets more difficult as youmore people need to be organized.
The larger a company is the more of its internal structures, rules, policies, history, etc are devoted just to organizing people.
For me, realizing this was like the first time you hear a flourescent light buzzing in an otherwise quiet room.
Reasonable people can differ on this point, but for my own sake I'd much rather avoid all the people-organizing baggage that comes with large companies.
I don't have a hard-and-fast rule about the size of a place I want to work but the larger a place is then generally the more reason I need to want to be there.
Of course, this is all kind of theoretical at this point, as Flipstone is my forever home.
doThings :: String -> T.Text -> NEL.NonEmpty Char -> BS.ByteString -> IO ()
doThings = error "WTF is this"Simple CSS frameworks - 2024-09-30
I really like simple drop-in CSS resets like the one I use for this site.
At the time of writing, I'm using Pico but I also considered tacit
The idea is that they provide nice default styling of HTML elements out of the box without the need to reference any specific classes.
The idea works well for sites that are much more content than layout - like this one.
Using tacit is a matter of incluing this link tag in the page's HEAD element:
<link rel="stylesheet" href="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/@picocss/pico@2/css/pico.min.css">Let people fail - 2024-09-25
How (and why) to let people fail
Warning: This, like most things, will involve a fair bit of projection.
Effective and enjoyable collaboration with other people requires mutual trust.
I believe that for someone to feel trusted by another person then they need the space to fail.
I think this is obvious when considering what not having the space to fail looks like.
Not having the space to fail means your collaborator is doing one of two things:
- Directing every action you take a.k.a. micromanaging
- Coming behind you and redoing all of your work
Both of these are attempts by the other person to minimize risk (or simply cases where they're failing to manage their own anxieties).
These actions are counter productive to fostering trust and should be avoided unless failure is too costly.
I'm not saying all collaboration requires building trust. There are times when you simply can't afford failure or mistakes.
What I am saying is that people frequently misjudge the value in deliberately giving others the space to fail for the sake of fostering trust.
Building trust is important and we should do it deliberately.
TODO Just what is it you do here?
I've never liked working at large companies. Mostly because I think they complicate things, but some things are more complicated at small companies.
TODO Managing Expectations
I'll figure this out one day. Until then I'll just keep saying yes and burning myself out making everyone happy.
HTTPS @ Homelab
HTTPS @ Home
I run a lot of services at home.
This includes, but isn't limited to
- ArchiveBox
- VaultWarden
- Navidrome
- Plex
- LibrePhotos
- This blog
and a lot more.
Pretty much anything that's served up over HTTP is always nice if not necessary to have behind TLS.
LetsEncrypt long ago brought free certs to the masses and there are a lot of tools for automating that nowadays.
My preferred approach for getting all the unnecessary nonsense I self-host at home behind TLS is Caddy.
I have a super straight forward setup, generally:
- Run Caddy in a docker container
- Create a wildcard CNAME record in my DNS pointing at my home's (effectively) static IP
- Add an entry in my Caddyfile for each services I'm running at home on its own subdomain
- If it's a service then I add it with a
reverse_proxyblock - If it's a static site (like this) then there's a block for
- If it's something I want only accessible on my home network then I put a block like
@local_network {
path *
remote_ip
}
in the directive. And voila.
Then tell Caddy to reload the config and I'm done.
Multi-room audio setup
My multiroom audio setup
I've put my home audio solution together out of the following components.
- Snapcast
- MPD
- Librespot
- Shairport-sync
- A mini-PC in my closet running the above software
- Two Raspberry Pi 4s
- Four Raspberry Pi Zero Ws
- Some desktop speakers and some Bluetooth speakers (wired to the Pis)
Each of the Raspberry Pis is in a room or porch attached to a speaker.
Snapcast lets me take an audio source and synchronize it across multiple
clients. Each of the Raspberry Pis are running a snapclient instance
and play whatever the snapserver instance tells them to.
Snapcast is setup to send whichever of the streams (MPD, Spotify, Shairport-sync/AirPlay) is playing audio to each of the clients that are connected to it.
This lets me or anyone else on my WiFi network play directly on one or more of the speakers - each named for the room that they're in using either Spotify, AirPlay, picking from my own music collection or by pointing at a URL (like to a podcast episode).
This works out great and we've used it at home for the past year.
I'd like to get the podcast experience to a more seamless place but it's pretty OK right now using AirMusic on my phone to play audio to the speakers over AirPlay.
vi-editing everywhere
vi modal editing in most places
For my sake, I prefer to have Vim bindings in as many places as possible.
Most shells can be configured to use Vim bindings by putting set -o vi
somewhere in your shell startup script.
If you're using ZSH then you'll probably want an additional binding to restore CTRL-R reverse history search.
bindkey '^R' history-incremental-search-backward
For CLI tools that use the readline library then you can configure its
input mode using a .inputrc file in your $HOME directory.
This affects REPLs like ghci and tools like psql.
set editing-mode vi
$if mode=vi
set keymap vi-command
# these are for vi-command mode
Control-l: clear-screen
set keymap vi-insert
# these are for vi-insert mode
Control-l: clear-screen
$endifAWS Cloudwatch Metric Filters
Structed and passively collected metrics via AWS CloudWatch
AWS is a vast and sprawling set of services. It can be hard to find the hidden gems like this one so I wanted to point this one out.
Structured metrics are very helpful to monitoring the health and function of an software system.
- Do you want to know how long a particular transaction typically takes?
- How fast your database queries are?
- How long external APIs take to respond?
- Fire an alert when a particular function on the site happens too many times? Or too few times?
…plus a million other things specific to whatever system you're working on.
There are a lot of great tools for doing this and one that you might not know about is AWS CloudWatch Metric Filters. If you're already on AWS then you should consider these because it requires only that your application logs to CloudWatch.
If you're on ECS then the awslogs log driver for Docker gets you that nearly for free. By "free" I mean that your application itself can have zero dependencies on AWS services and not require any AWS credentials or libraries to start pumping out metrics that you can visualize, alert on and record over time.
The AWS docs themselves offer the canonical reference for configuring these so I won't go into detail here.
However, the gist is that for a log filter you define the following properties
- A filter pattern for extracting a discrete metric value out of a log entry
- A metric name to store the value in
- An optional dimension for sub-classifying the value
- And finally a log group to extract the metric values from
After that you just run the application and as the logs roll in the metric values get pumped out. Then you can define alarms for alerting on them, graph them, define autoscaling rules from them and more.
To conclude - AWS is big and hairy. While there are benefits to staying platform agnostic, some AWS services don't require much or any coupling of your application code to take advantage of. Cloudwatch Metrics is one of those services and you can get a lot of value out of it with not much effort.
The default page
This page is rendered with the default render function one-default
specified in ONE org property.
Do you want a table of content?
As you can see, one-default doesn't add a table of content (TOC). If
you want a default render function that adds the TOC to the page you can
use the render function one-default-with-toc presented in The default
page with a TOC.
Headline foo
Headline bar
Some content.
Headline baz
tree.
├── assets
│ └── one.css
├── one.org
└── public
├── blog
│ ├── default
│ │ └── index.html
│ ├── default-home-list-pages
│ │ └── index.html
│ ├── one-default-doc
│ │ └── index.html
│ ├── one-default-with-sidebar
│ │ └── index.html
│ └── one-default-with-toc
│ └── index.html
├── index.html
└── one.css
8 directories, 9 files
The default page with TOC and sidebar
This page is rendered with the function one-default-doc specified
in the org property ONE.
Do you want to know more about one.el?
Check the documentation at https://one.tonyaldon.com.
Headline foo
Headline bar
Some content.
Headline baz
tree.
├── assets
│ └── one.css
├── one.org
└── public
├── blog
│ ├── default
│ │ └── index.html
│ ├── default-home-list-pages
│ │ └── index.html
│ ├── one-default-doc
│ │ └── index.html
│ ├── one-default-with-sidebar
│ │ └── index.html
│ └── one-default-with-toc
│ └── index.html
├── index.html
└── one.css
8 directories, 9 files