Four months went by too fast. I got so caught up in being productive that there was literally no time to idle around and blog.
Things that have happened since the last post, mostly starting in June:
- Steam announced EOL for Windows 7. That means I needed to upgrade my build
even though I barely play anything but Path of Exile these days. Got a really nice rig for a really good price. - Went to Canada. I've been planning to make a post all about that, but there's the pending "migrate off Ghost" plan that past posts mentioned that hasn't happened yet. I don't want to make a long post before I migrated.
- Looked into homelab equipment. Yes yes, I already have the Zimaboard, but I want to expand! Dump even more money into things I don't need! Learn all the things! I didn't actually plan to actually spend money right now, only do some basic research and start toward end of the year. But as luck would have it, someone at work sold some enterprise server equipment for dirt cheap, and I'm buying it even if I have no idea how to set it up or use it yet. The cherry on top is a killer 18TB SATA HDD deal I found on /r/buildapcsales. I snagged 3. They don't fit in the enterprise server. I NEED TO BUY MORE PARTS. I also learned about the magic Ikea miracle known as the LackRack.
- Set up a passable home network. Just on a Zimaboard, I managed to set up Caddy, Pihole, a Git server, and a bunch more Docker containers for learning web development. When the nights were sweltering hot and tanking my productivity, I went to bed feeling extremely smart.
- Going off the above, the Git + Docker container setup took me a good 2 months to set up for a secret project. I can at least say I have passable experience with DevOps now. I went from doing everything manually to having a mostly automated workflow that does most of what I need to bring the secret project into production. I even found 2 bugs in my tools along the way and even fixed one of them 😤
- Settled on a VM host to do even more sysadmin learning. This has to do with the secret project, though migrating off Ghost onto a different platform played a part as well. I considered sticking with the current host since I really like how cheap it is, but depending on what platform I use next, it might not have great support. (Spoiler: Moving to Hugo after a lot of evaluation. Staying on this host since the wiki has Hugo documentation. If it doesn't work out then I'll move somewhere else.)
Leaving Ghost on life support until I set up my Hugo workflow and figure out how to best make posts from now on. SURELY migrating will happen by the end of the year 🤡