Last night I went to DigitalOcean and spun up a tiny new, $4/month droplet – on my own dime! It sounds crazy, but I’ve never actually wanted to pay for hosting myself before. But I have a fun little web app cooking up, one that might eventually pay that $4/month back with interests, and I decided, why not, it’s time to finally put some of my own skin in the game with this whole sysadmin thing....
What’s the best way to get a job? Show someone with a job to do that you can do the job within their iron triangle. What’s the best way you can show someone you can handle a complicated k8s deployment, with 7 different CNCF-approved add-ons, zero-downtime rollouts and a whole bunch of YAML files? Probably by competently and publicly running your own complicated k8s infrastructure. Self-hosters remind me a lot of the sysadmins of yore, who mostly ended up in the profession because they just couldn’t help but mess around with their underlying computing machine until they knew all kinds of weird nooks and crannies within it....
It would have to be finstem, a simple command-line program I wrote to reduce Finnish words down to their root form. Finnish is a lot like Latin or Russian in that its words often become lumbering behemoths of rewritten consonants, suffixes upon suffixes, and this makes it hard to look up in a dictionary – that is, until you factor in its very regular orthography and the phenomenal efforts of the Finnish programming industry: finstem is basically a very specialized UI for the OpenOffice spell checker, and I have no shame in admitting that....
I’ve been on vacation this week, and part of what I’ve been up to is fixing up the Selkouutiset Archive. Like most of my websites these days, SA is powered by Hugo, which means handling a lot of Markdown documents, which means I opted to use an intermediate Git repo as a submodule to actually store the custom-processed documents. After a few tweaks here and there, I found myself wanting to quickly flip through all of the Markdown documents I had generated for each news day....
1 wall "Hello, world!" will send a message that looks like 1 2 3 Broadcast message from root@localhost (pts/0) (Sat Feb 1 14:50:14 2024): Hello world! to every user currently logged in to the system. When might this be relevant? When you’re working in a small team, by remoting into custom hardware, and constantly reflashing the device, to give everyone a heads up, for instance: 1 wall "Device will be reflashed in 5 minutes" && sleep 300 && ....