2022 in Review
2022 was a busy year, this is a concise review of almost everything I did & learned.
- January
- February
- March
- April & May
- June, July, & August
- September
- October
- November
- December
- 2023 & Beyond
January
My First Dagger Commit
This was a simple one-line commit that updated the documentation around shell auto-completion.
Set Up Gitea
In late January I set up a Gitea server to host my school projects without overcrowding my GitHub profile with private repositories.
I learned a lot about networking during this project. I got to configure both HTTPS and SSH (on a nonstandard port), and routing them from the public internet through the reverse proxy, VM, and finally onto the Docker container.
February
Ansible (For Local Host)
This is a simple collection of scripts that configures a fresh Arch Linux install. It saved my bacon when I had to do a quick re-install on my laptop.
March
Dagger-ified RoboShpee
I converted the Dockerfile that was being used to build RoboShpee
to dagger (what is now the CUE SDK). Later that day I reverted the PR
because multi-platform builds were not yet supported – the bot runs
on a Raspberry Pi (arm) & GitHub Actions runs on amd.
Dagger-ified this blog.
KGB33/blog.kgb33.dev PR #2 Daggerify the Blog
Not discouraged by the RoboShpee failure, I Dagger-ified the blog.
The containerization pipeline is fairly simple, but the theme I use
requires Hugo extended, which needs to be built from source. Which required
Go 1.18, at the time the dagger CUE SDK provided 1.16 as the default;
so I submitted a PR…
Breaking Dagger
This was a fairly simple PR, bump the Go version, add an underscore, fix a typo so the tests actually ran. It passed all the tests and was merged without issue.
Then the next day dagger/dagger Issue #1965
was submitted. TLDR: Go 1.18 added VCS info in compiled binaries by default, but dagger was
a. not sending the .git directory by default, and b. the Alpine Linux base container did not have
the git binary.
WireGuard Setup
I configured a spit tunnel VPN using WireGuard, OPNsense, and systemd-networkd.
April & May
Java Design Patterns
This group project was particularly challenging not because of the content, but because of the group members. A range of operating systems and editors were used throughout the group, and it needed to run first try on the Grader’s system too. Using Gradle and GitHub actions ensured that all group members submitted code with a uniform style and passing tests.
June, July, & August
FlightAware
Over the summer I was a Systems Intern at FlightAware working as part of the Operations team.
I used my existing Python skills to build KNIT, a two part program used to collect
fairly constant device information. Then, to deploy KNIT, I leveraged the existing tools that my
co-workers had implemented.
The device agent was deployed to every bare-metal Linux machine using Salt Stack. It then runs once a day and sends a JSON payload to a RabbitMQ instance in Kubernetes.
The RabbitMQ instance is configured using Flux, Kustomize, and the RabbitMQ Kubernetes Operator.
Lastly, the second part pulls data from the RabbitMQ instance and pushes it into Netbox. KNIT also implements a simple retry backoff loop if Netbox is unavailable. This part is also deployed using Flux, Kustomize, and Kubernetes.
Both parts are containerized using Nix in GitHub actions, with secrets managed using Mozilla SOPS.
September
I built a Keyboard & swapped to the Dvorak layout!
Swapping from a staggered to otholinear was enough of a shock for my muscle memory swapping layouts didn’t hurt much more.
I also swapped to home row mods, “precondition” has an excellent write-up on them](https://precondition.github.io/home-row-mods) (I use “GACS/◆⎇⎈⇧”).
Also, (technically in October) I configured Kmonad to change my laptop layout
to match my desktop Keyboard.
October
Hyperland, Eww & Nasty Notifications
In October, I changed my window manager from Sway to Hyperland, and with it, I redid my status bar using Elkowars Wacky Widgets
Nasty Notifications is my solution to some missing portions of Eww. It’s a rust CLI that provides a Freedesktop Notification server interface as well as Hyperland workspace information.
Ansible (For the Homelab)
Using Salt at FlightAware made me keenly aware of my need for a similar tool in my homelab. After considering Chef, Puppet, Salt & Ansible I ended up going with Ansible due to three main reasons:
- Excellent Documentation
- Written in Python
- Primarily a push model
I started In October with a few simple playbooks, but improvements & additions continued throughout the remainder of the year.
Blog Posts
GPG Keys
A quick walk through of creating GPG keys and configuring Git and GitHub.
Dagger (CUE SDK) and GitHub Actions
This is a continuation from “Daggerifing the Blog- Part 1” from back in
March. It quickly goes over using GitHub actions to build whenever changes
are made to main.
November
Second Keyboard
Not content with just settling for Kmonad on my laptop, I built a wireless Ferris Sweep to use as a travel Keyboard. Although, it quickly became my favorite, mainly due to its small form factor.
My Key map Firmware repo has an excellent key map diagram.
Dagger Python SDK
I was lucky enough to gain access to the Dagger Python SDK early access. I took full advantage of this by re-daggerifing RoboShpee - after all, it’s a python program and dagger now has multi-platform support.
KGB33/RoboShpee PR #11 added support for the beta and PR #12 added support for the full release & added GitHub Actions.
I also contributed back to the Python SDK by improving some error messages PR #3825 and the associated tests in PR #3880.
December
December was a weird month, I spent half of it learning about Packer, Terraform, and Cloud-init; and the other half applying to jobs. The two following projects are direct results of this.
Raincloud
A rust TFTP (Trivial File Transfer Protocol) server that serves a git repository.
Primarily designed to serve user-data Cloud-init files.
Rattlesume
A python CLI that combines markdown snippets into a complete document as defined by YAML files.
Cheat.sh
I created a zsh plugin that fuzzy searches over cheat.sh entries & wrote a blog post describing my process.
2023 & Beyond
I have a few goals for 2023:
- Set up a local DNS server
- Ansiblilze a Kubernetes Cluster.
- Deploy to said cluster using GitOps (Flux or ArgoCD)
- Experiment with:
- VyOS
- Ceph
- Keep an engineering journal - it should help make writing next year’s review a lot easier.