Other articles


  1. Personal Goals for 2019

    Sat 12 January 2019

    It's been quite a long time since I've publicly posted goals. One year into my next job, it's time self-motivate long term self-improvement goals by discussing them in public.

    1. Make Anki a daily habit
    2. Start and complete a useful machine learning project
    3. Master puppet
    4. Start attending tech ...
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  2. Advancing the state of the dotfiles repo art

    Wed 22 August 2018

    Tracking dotfiles with revision control is old tech, with people originally promoting the practice using CVS. Customizing settings is a great productivity booster, but trying to remember how you configured nethack at your last job is a huge frustration and time sink. Fortunately humanity has progressed, and at this point ...

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  3. Dispelling the Git Illusion

    Sun 19 August 2018

    The DevOps world is wonderful. Amazing! Life changing, even! You practice Infrastructure As Code, so if you want to make a change, you write some Puppet code, merge the commit into master, and within an hour your fleet of servers has your change, and the world is a little bit ...

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  4. Podcasts 2016

    Sun 25 December 2016

    Every so often, I see a podcast recommendation thread on HN / Reddit / elsewhere. Rather than repeat myself, here's an annotated list of podcasts I listen to. If you're needing a great podcast Android player, I recommend AntennaPod, which has a thriving open source community behind it. On to ...

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  5. Rule Zero of FinOpsDev

    Wed 16 March 2016

    I'm working on a personal finance project codenamed FinOpsDev (rebranding suggestions welcome), aiming to reduce drudgery to near zero with automation, and exploit the increased velocity to run automated tasks more often, etc. Like DevOps for your checkbook. Or like Continous Accounting.

    As a base, I'm using GNUCash ...

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  6. N900 Eulogy

    Fri 23 November 2012

    3 years ago, Nokia released an intriguing option into the smartphone market. The N900 was a true Linux phone, and a simple, freely available app was all you needed to get root access to your hardware. The N900 was not a massive hit with carriers, and not a massive hit ...

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  7. PuppetConf 2012

    Sun 30 September 2012

    Recovered from the post-con crash a while ago, so it's time to write up some thoughts. Last week I attended PuppetConf with my coworkers at the OSL. The OSL attended PuppetConf primarily as a pre-deployment information gathering exercise. We want to avoid common pitfalls, and be able to plan ...

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