Fixed broken fetch

Test Pandoc markdown
2024-10-13 22:16:37 +08:00 · 2024-10-13 22:14:58 +08:00
11 changed files with 1283 additions and 0 deletions
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 ::: navbar
 <div>
 [Home](../index.html)
 </div>
 <div>
 [Blog](blog--01.html)
 </div>
 <div>
 [Git](https://renraku.dingo-bramble.ts.net/clement)
 </div>
 <div>
 [CV](../files/CV.pdf)
 </div>
 :::
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 <div>
 # Programming Anxiety
 </div>
 Programming is one of the cornerstones of modern information technology.
 It is what enables the entire Internet to deliver a myriad of services
 and information to everyone at any instant. We live in an era where all
 sorts of amazing programming projects exists, especially the Linux
 kernel and the GCC compiler. These amazing programs are the product of
 tens of thousands of hours devoted by legendary experts. I admire how
 programs has helped humanity as a whole. So while most of my previous
 posts have been about the progression of what I have learnt, this post
 is not one of them.
 I started learning about programming in the earlier part of this decade;
 I don\'t really remember the specific date anymore. Learning programming
 was fun. Reading blogs, articles, and disseminations about programming
 was fun too. But what comes after those? The culmination of all that
 knowledge and skills is to write your own program. To set your fingers
 free and ultimately find their way to a creative product of your own.
 Would it be self-sabotage for a noob programmer to have read
 well-written articles discussing the pros and cons of incorporating open
 source libraries in your project? Or the fastest/most-concise
 implementation to sort and filter data structures? Or how should a
 programmer write a program so that he can easily write unit tests for?
 GCC or LLVM? Imperative or functional? The latest netsec update about
 exploiting common bugs in poorly-written programs? These questions and
 information weigh on me before I even write my first function. Would I
 have done this better? Did I make the right choice using tuples instead
 of arrays? Is it time to refactor this tiny functionality?
 Most of the advice for beginning programmers have always boiled down to
 \"Start small, start well\". But even with my best intentions, I would
 not have known where does one draw the line at well. The fear of
 finishing a program only to realize that it was never going to be
 functional, and I have wasted hours of my time only to backspace my way
 to Line 1. The disappointment after writing a program that I think is
 somewhat decent, only to find that a similar open source library already
 implements this with impeccable style and documentation. As a result,
 even if they would have never taken off, dozens of my programming
 projects have never left the drawing board.
 What would have been the lesson of this post? I don\'t know. Perhaps I
 should just learn to embrace the idea that the programming process
 inherently requires a lot of rewriting and will inevitably be filled
 with security issues. Thank you for reading.
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 > "What is better: to be born good or to overcome your evil nature
 > through great effort?"\
 > - Paarthurnax
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 ::: navbar
 <div>
 [Home](../index.html)
 </div>
 <div>
 [Blog](blog--01.html)
 </div>
 <div>
 [Git](https://renraku.dingo-bramble.ts.net/clement)
 </div>
 <div>
 [CV](../files/CV.pdf)
 </div>
 :::
 ------------------------------------------------------------------------
 <div>
 # LXC and Friends
 </div>
 With Proxmox in place, I started work on LXC containers. They really are
 wonderful. Fast to start up, way lower memory footprint, and much easier
 configuration in general. Without the long wait for VMs to fully
 install, I have a lot more motivation to set up some stuff I\'ve been
 planning.
 First up is Wireguard. Wireguard required some fiddling because
 Proxmox\'s Linux kernel has not integrated the kernel module. While I
 could\'ve achieved this on a virtual machine without altering my
 hypervisor, I felt Wireguard was worth it. Wireguard is so easy to set
 up and comes with an extremely low latency cost. Now that my Android
 device is always routed through Wireguard, I have a lot more options to
 secure and experiment with its networking.
 Next up is a popular favourite, Pi-Hole. I\'ve always been hesitant
 about installing Pi-Hole on a physical device like a RPi or a VM because
 it felt like overkill for such a simple application. A containerized
 environment is just perfect. I\'ve also wired devices connected to my
 Wireguard instance to use Pi-Hole as the DNS server. It was enlightening
 knowing what my devices are doing. Side note: Firefox\'s telemetry
 service is pretty aggressive if you leave it on.
 The last application is Apache Guacamole. This is a rather \"heavy\"
 application because it runs on Java Tomcat, but Guac is seriously
 amazing. If you\'ve always been worried about securing entry to your
 devices, fear no more. With Guac, you can use your browser as the remote
 gateway to your internal network. I\'ve never wanted to expose my SSH
 jumper to the ravages of the Internet, so Guac allows me to have
 2-factor authentication and easy access to my internal network while
 I\'m not at home. Why not connect to my Wireguard instance you say?
 Mainly because I have not automated adding devices to my Wireguard
 instance, so the manual work is still slightly cumbersome. Also, Guac
 does not require any specialized remote tools such as OpenSSH or PuTTY;
 It only requires a browser that supports SSL.
 ## The Drawbacks
 Perhaps the largest drawbacks of LXC containers when compared to Docker,
 is the \"full Linux stack\" available in each container. While some
 container templates (Alpine) are slimmer than others, most of my
 containers run on Debian. There is work needed to keep them up-to-date,
 so this perfectly sets up the environment for me to pick up more
 advanced config management. Ansible Level 2, here I come.
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 > Do not pity the dead, Harry, pity the living. And above all, those who
 > live without love.\
 > - Albus Dumbledore
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 ::: navbar
 <div>
 [Home](../index.html)
 </div>
 <div>
 [Blog](blog--01.html)
 </div>
 <div>
 [Git](https://renraku.dingo-bramble.ts.net/clement)
 </div>
 <div>
 [CV](../files/CV.pdf)
 </div>
 :::
 ------------------------------------------------------------------------
 <div>
 # Migrating Everything to Proxmox - Part 1
 </div>
 It was almost inevitable that this would happen. After getting more
 comfortable with Proxmox, I realized that I needed more reliability for
 the applications running on my RPis. Things are running fine on my RPi,
 but it was a matter of time before disaster struck. So begin my efforts
 to move everything over to Proxmox.
 ## A Dance with Docker
 While almost everything could run on or built for Docker one way or
 another these days, running complicated applications on Docker will
 eventually uncover some really esoteric behaviours. So I stuck to using
 LXC containers for most of my applications. I used Docker for the
 applications that I can deploy and leave them alone, hence Redis,
 WikiJS, and WatchTower. WatchTower ensures that the containers stay
 healthy and updated.
 ## Preparing The Base
 With the easiest stuff out of the way, I started preparing the LXC
 container templates. I opted for two templates: CentOS 7 and Debian 10.
 I updated them, added my SSH public keys, installed the basic tools, and
 it was good to go.
 ## Taking Apart Services on RPi
 As a result of my messy installations on RPi, I had to scrounge around
 for the configs and data for Gitea and Apache httpd. After that, it was
 a quick tarball to be transferred over to their respective containers.
 This time, I\'ve created a separate container dedicated for PostgreSQL
 and MySQL. Doing so was somewhat liberating; I now know where I can
 access and isolate my databases.
 ## The Disaster
 What is a migration without a major data loss disaster? So, I lied
 previously about the \'simple\' applications I run on Docker. I tried
 migrating my Nextcloud instance to Docker. Sound simple right? Mount the
 NFS directory on the Docker host, spin up the Nextcloud Docker image
 with the directories and the already-migrated PostgreSQL user and tables
 ready, and magic would take place. Turns out a new Nextcloud instance
 would immediately nuke /data to set up a \'clean slate\'. My NFS
 directory was clean enough, I\'ll say. To make things worse, I was
 putting off scripting for my Btrfs snapshots and backups. With them, I
 could\'ve easily rolled back my changes.
 The silver lining was that I did not keep any important information on
 the instance. As the old adage goes, backup before doing stupid things.
 This cowboy move was a hard lesson for me.
 ## Conclusion
 This concludes Part 1. Most of my time was spent untangling all the
 services that I was experimenting on my RPi and deciding what gets to
 live or not. So far, I\'ve learned a hard lesson and had to plan out my
 migration before doing so. I only look forward for the rest to come.
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 > For we each of us deserve everything, every luxury that was ever piled
 > in the tombs of the dead kings, and we each of us deserve nothing, not
 > a mouthful of bread in hunger. Have we not eaten while another
 > starved? Will you punish us for that? Will you reward us for the
 > virtue of starving while others ate? No man earns punishment, no man
 > earns reward. Free your mind of the idea of deserving, the idea of
 > earning, and you will begin to be able to think.\
 > - Odo
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 ::: navbar
 <div>
 [Home](../index.html)
 </div>
 <div>
 [Blog](blog--01.html)
 </div>
 <div>
 [Git](https://renraku.dingo-bramble.ts.net/clement)
 </div>
 <div>
 [CV](../files/CV.pdf)
 </div>
 :::
 ------------------------------------------------------------------------
 <div>
 # A Brief Goodbye to CentOS
 </div>
 The traditional CentOS Linux distribution as we know it is dead. Here is
 another drop in the ocean of opinion pieces that follow the news of its
 death. After cooling down from the initial rush of blood to my head,
 here is my take on this event.
 ## Why Did This Probably Happen
 With the advent of DevOps and SRE, businesses and startups are moving
 away from the old-school concept of traditional server clusters to
 running their applications on disposable containers. The trend is clear
 and true. Developers are increasingly less reliant on a tried-and-true
 Linux distribution that lasts for a decade. With containers, developers
 can develop, test, deploy, and rollback with blazing fast velocity.
 ## How It Will Affect All of Us
 Without a doubt one of the most popular Linux distributions to ever
 exist, CentOS was prevalent among all kinds of computing systems ranging
 from simple database servers to billion-dollar computer clusters. There
 are countless organizations have made the business decision to keep
 using the traditional model, or organizations that do not require
 microservices at all. With CentOS drawn from below their feet, a lot of
 organizations will be forced to migrate to another option, or fork out a
 pretty penny for RHEL. Besides, on-prem deployment of any container
 orchestration tool still requires a stable Linux distribution.
 The second ripple effect it will have is towards the skilled
 professionals who have spend decades on CentOS. Not every company is
 willing to pay up for RHEL or risk using CentOS Stream. For those who
 migrate to Debian or OpenSUSE, they will have to retrain and adapt with
 different tools.
 ## Questioning IBM/Red Hat Decisions
 The most obvious of them all was, was it necessary for CentOS to die?
 With CentOS Stream to track ahead of RHEL, it is still possible for
 CentOS to remain functional and serve its purpose. This is clearly a
 business decision to increase profits. It used to be that developers
 wanted to write for RHEL but did not want pay for it; CentOS filled that
 need. What also happened was that some companies decided that they
 wanted the free experience all the way. Red Hat now provides free use of
 the Red Hat Universal Base Image for developers. With this, companies no
 longer have an excuse.
 Secondly, why the PR disaster? In hindsight, there is no way to deliver
 this news gently to the public. However, I felt that Red Hat gave the
 bird to the open source community, especially those who contributed to
 CentOS, by pulling the plug on Centos 8 towards the end of 2021. There
 wasn\'t even a courtesy to end it later then CentOS 7\'s EOL date, June
 30th 2024. A raw-dogged \"Pay up, now\" to everyone.
 Last of all, what is the next move from Red Hat/IBM? With CentOS gone,
 there is a huge vacuum for another to take its place. RHEL sources are
 still available and can still be repackaged. While Red Hat currently has
 massive influence over Linux in general, is this a arrogant statement
 proclaiming \"Hey, you can\'t live without me\"? Another ominuous take
 with conspiratorial undertones would be that Red Hat plans to eventually
 scrap the FOSS model, but I would have to wear my tin hat for this one.
 ## So, What Happens Now?
 Almost immediately after the release, all the attention is now directed
 to towards filling the space that CentOS will leave behind. Undoubtedly,
 Ubuntu and SUSE would try to assert their presence with their open
 source alternatives. Debian, the largest behemoth of them all, hopefully
 will receive funding and participation like never before. A silver
 lining of this event would perhaps be the buzzing excitement of what
 will be and can be. It is time to be excited about Linux again. I, for
 one, have to begin migrating my CentOS containers and virtual machines
 to Debian.
 CentOS\'s founder, Gregory Kurtzer, is working with the community to
 establish Rocky Linux. Join them at
 https://webchat.freenode.net/#rockylinux .
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 > I doubt that the imagination can be suppressed. If you truly
 > eradicated it in a child, he would grow up to be an eggplant.\
 > - Ursula K. Le Guin
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 ::: navbar
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 [Home](../index.html)
 </div>
 <div>
 [Blog](blog--01.html)
 </div>
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 [Git](https://renraku.dingo-bramble.ts.net/clement)
 </div>
 <div>
 [CV](../files/CV.pdf)
 </div>
 :::
 ------------------------------------------------------------------------
 <div>
 # A Walk Along The Side
 </div>
 This year has been tumultuous so far. Combine equal parts cabin fever,
 poor mental health, and escapism, and you get a person who has
 difficulties putting words into a creative composition. Instead of
 posting a success story later about how I have overcome my obstacles in
 life, I felt it was equally important to document my lower moments as
 well. This post would be a feeble attempt to keep this website alive.
 ## Proxmox VE 7.0
 Kudos to Proxmox and their team for the latest release of Proxmox VE.
 The upgrade process was smooth and well documented. The inclusion of the
 upgrade checks was amazing to say the least.
 ## New Work, New Schedule
 No longer a support engineer, I now have a regular work and sleep
 routine. This routine frees me from the debilitating schedule that once
 held me prisoner from social activities or engaging in self-improvement.
 Ironically, this has only enabled my escapism habits.
 I spent several months grinding away Witcher 3 and its DLCs. It\'s an
 amazing RPG for a game of its time. Between killing monsters for coin
 and saving Ciri, there were plenty of side quests to keep the player
 going. The only downside was how the devs decided to handle the
 post-game content. What a shame. I also dropped a few weeks into
 Rimworld and its expansive world of war crimes and extensive modding. I
 ultimately stopped playing because of the soul-crushing loss of a
 moderately successful colony. It was fun making money by harvesting
 organs from prisoners and skinning their bodies for leather. Mood
 debuffs begone.
 During these days of gaming, I lost track of my work on myself. The game
 sessions were fun, but not nourishing. Like tending liquor to a wounded
 soul, this escapism does not heal, it only numbs it for another day. I
 find nothing but more guilt at the bottom of the metaphorical bottle.
 ## Lockdowns
 As the Covid situation worsens in Malaysia, hope is bleak and no end is
 in sight. Cases in our nation rise to record highs but its people are
 furious. Furious to be held prisoner in their own homes but not furious
 enough to discipline themselves for a safer future. Citizens have never
 been more divided ; An increasing number of the lesser minded are
 pushing for the release of the lockdowns; The infected be damned, my
 momentary freedom worth their sacrifice, until the time comes for my
 lungs to be on the chopping block. As much as I\'m privileged to be safe
 from the horrors of the pandemic, cabin fever is catching up to me. I
 feel myself losing grip of my identity and my flow of time. My moods
 grew from restlessness to agitation, then to apathy. I can only hope for
 the better.
 ## Unexpected EOF
 I shall stop here. Thanks for reading so far. For you dear reader, stay
 strong and stay safe. Like the euphoric sight of your first double
 rainbow or the arduous toils of your younger days, times like these,
 too, shall pass.
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 > The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed
 > to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all.
 > Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to
 > take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at
 > twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up? And men
 > with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the
 > crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit. A million
 > people hungry, needing the fruit- and kerosene sprayed over the golden
 > mountains. And the smell of rot fills the country. Burn coffee for
 > fuel in the ships. Burn corn to keep warm, it makes a hot fire. Dump
 > potatoes in the rivers and place guards along the banks to keep the
 > hungry people from fishing them out. Slaughter the pigs and bury them,
 > and let the putrescence drip down into the earth. There is a crime
 > here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that
 > weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our
 > success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks,
 > and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a
 > profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the
 > certificate- died of malnutrition- because the food must rot, must be
 > forced to rot. The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the
 > river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to
 > get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand
 > still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs
 > being killed in a ditch and covered with quick-lime, watch the
 > mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes
 > of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry
 > there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of
 > wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.\
 > - John Steinbeck
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 ::: navbar
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 [Home](../index.html)
 </div>
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 </div>
 <div>
 [CV](../files/CV.pdf)
 </div>
 :::
 ------------------------------------------------------------------------
 <div>
 # A Taste of Progress
 </div>
 TLDR : I passed the CKA test. The test was not hard, but neither was it
 a walk in the park.
 Several months ago, I was in a slump, weighed down by the pandemic
 situation. Figuring that there is not much I can do about my mental
 wellbeing, perhaps it was time to face the fact I had two soon-to-expire
 exam vouchers at hand. One of them was for the CKA test. After two
 months of grind, I took the exam and passed it.
 ## KodeKloud
 Realizing LF\'s course on Kubernetes was hot trash, I decided to
 subscribe to KodeKloud and took Mumshad Mannambeth\'s course to assist
 my learning process. This post can also be my personal review of the
 course. The course content was pretty comprehensive. It had a gentle
 learning curve to guide its students towards the course content, going
 so far as to provide primers for topics that are pretty tough for
 newbies. (Networking, openssl, etc) There were also plenty of lab
 exercises for each topic that challenges the student to think harder.
 Some tips are also provided to navigate the test quickly. Without the
 course, I would have skimmed through a lot of details that were pretty
 important. I was pretty satisfied with the value of the content in this
 course.
 Reviewing the site experience and design however, is where the shining
 image of KodeKloud starts to show its rough edges. The quality of the
 closed captions were atrocious. You see, I have the habit of watching at
 1.5x speed assisted by closed captions; This is the learning mode where
 I absorb material best. Any slower and I would start yawning. The closed
 captions make me cringe every time I read it. Spelling errors are all
 over the place, poor timings, and sometimes the captions are just
 straight up missing. The video does not consider that the captions would
 obscure its content, nor does the player provide a way to configure
 transparency for the captions background, so I had to frequently pause
 and unpause just to see what is under the captions. You took a 15 min
 break to get some coffee? The video player would crash without saving
 where you left off, so be prepared to refresh and rewatch the first few
 minutes. Labs also frequently disconnect or fail to deploy, which can be
 quite frustrating since I have waited several minutes for it to deploy.
 These are only some of the issues that are present on KodeKloud.
 If you are going to take the test, would I recommend this course?
 Absolutely. It can be completed within a month. I do hope that KodeKloud
 puts in more effort to polish their site however; This product is not
 free after all.
 ## Practice, Practice, and What Else? Oh Yes, More Practice
 Perhaps the toughest part of the CKA test was the time limit provided.
 To prepare for the test, I reviewed the exam objectives multiple times.
 Even though the syntax for kubectl commands are mostly consistent, I
 practiced it to make sure I could rely on autocomplete reliably to
 finish my commands. kubectl explain was essential to quickly fill in
 memory gaps when filling out an especially long yaml file. (Looking at
 you, deployments) During the test, there is not a lot of time to
 \"figure things out\" and experiment a little. It was also important to
 know where the yaml templates are for each API resource in the
 Kubernetes documentation so that I did not have to retype everything.
 ## Some Thoughts
 Kubernetes is a tool that divides the DevOps populace. Just visit your
 nearest HN thread to learn all about the fierce debates surrounding it
 and the latest startup trying to revolutionize container orchestration.
 It is flexible, complex yet straightforward, and sufficiently large that
 some find a beast that needs too much effort to tame. All in all, it is
 a powerful tool to introduces as many complexities as many issues that
 is solves. The everything-is-an-API-resource approach makes it
 convenient to integrate with workflows, and the API resources that are
 versioned and modular really helps with the mental model when
 understanding k8s itself.
 ## One Step Forward
 This certification may not be much, but it was a good and hearty dose of
 happiness for myself; I am still the riding the high until this day. It
 is proof of my efforts, the days and nights spent hammering away at the
 keyboard, and that I have bettered myself. I can be more that I was
 yesterday, and I will continue to do so. To you dear reader: if you are
 taking the CKA test, I wish you the best of luck.
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 > The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and
 > sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid.
 > Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason
 > of the artist; a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the
 > terrible boredom of pain.\
 > - Ursula K. LeGuin, The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas
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 </div>
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 [Blog](blog--01.html)
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 </div>
 <div>
 [CV](../files/CV.pdf)
 </div>
 :::
 ------------------------------------------------------------------------
 <div>
 # Fighting With The Past
 </div>
 I am an avid user of RSS and I love my RSS app to death. It brings me a
 steady stream of news and information every day from the sources that I
 personally curate; a stream uncorrupted by the ad-funded Internet we
 have now. It is my breath of fresh air every morning before I suit up
 with adblockers and venture into the cancer-ridden wasteland of ads and
 content filler. The premise was simple: no-BS news fully in text with
 some images sprinkled in. Every article does not waste your time or
 attention. If need be, click the link at the bottom to read the full
 article. So a few months ago, an idea lit up in my mind and I thought
 \"Gee, wouldn\'t it be neat if my website was readable via RSS?\" and I
 got to work.
 ## Browsing RSS Specs
 As with most endeavours, everything seemed simple on the surface.
 Browsing through the [RSS
 specifications](https://www.rssboard.org/rss-specification), everything
 looked fine and dandy. A RSS feed is just an itemized list of your
 latest posts alongside some metadata about your site. Just generate a
 new XML file after every new post and serve it, and you\'re set for the
 day, right? Oh, how wrong I was.
 ## Static Pages And XML
 To put it simply, my posts are handwritten in HTML and are not
 dynamically generated with some CMS. This means that I have to find a
 way to convert HTML to a XML-kosher format somehow. Thus the hunt begun.
 In the end, I found [Tidy](https://www.html-tidy.org/), a tool that can
 clean up my messy HTML documents to XHTML. XHTML is XML-friendly, but it
 wasn\'t the end-all. I only needed the body, not the metadata. This was
 easily achievable with xmllint and XPATH. With the body prepped and
 ready, the tricky part is that while syntactically-comformant, HTML tags
 do not work. I wrapped the body as a CDATA section and went by my way.
 ## I Will Not Regret This, Will I?
 The last piece of the puzzle was the metadata for the posts. I went with
 a JSON file as a temporary databases for the posts, but this is a
 solution that is bound to bite me back in the future, but who cares
 about future me right? It works. The duct tape will do for now.
 ## Conclusion
 These 3 paragraphs took me weeks to read up about XML and RSS and
 thinking about the solution. While it works, this is less than ideal. I
 will be wrangling 3 data formats with a Bash script that is becoming
 increasingly unwieldy. Reading up XML has also enlightened, if not
 misguided, me that I need write with XML documents moving forward. If
 not redesigned, this issue is a ticking bomb waiting to blow up in my
 face. Time to think really hard. Thanks for reading.
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 > No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it\'s not the same
 > river and he\'s not the same man.\
 > - Heraclitus
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 [CV](../files/CV.pdf)
 </div>
 :::
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 <div>
 # New Year New Beginnings
 </div>
 ## Long Break
 Whew, it has been a long time since this website was up. Talk about
 downtime. Long story short, I got a new job as a Cloud Engineer. I moved
 to a new rental that did not have a router that supported port
 forwarding. I was not about to replace the shared WiFi and work got busy
 and yeah you get the idea. The website went down. My server is sleeping
 in the storage bin. Well that did not take long. Anyway, new year new
 me.
 ## Hosting Problems
 What do I do when self-hosting is now an issue? Time to turn to the
 \"cloud\". Turns out the cloud just means that your data is now hosted
 by another organization\'s computers. We are all familiar with the wry
 jokes about cloud platform by now. Anyway, I looked into what are the
 available free tier options that we have now. Thanks to past me, this
 site is just a bunch of static files ready to go, so hosting this site
 is not hard.
 Since I am already going with a cloud provider, I have higher
 requirements than just \"Nginx/Apache in a VM\". I looked into solutions
 that provides high availability worldwide and can remove maintenance
 headaches from self-hosting; or as the cool kids say, serverless
 solutions. If I am going to sacrifice my own privacy by not owning my
 own hosting, I am not letting the sacrifice go in vain. Here are my
 impressions of the options that I have explored.
 -   Microso - No.
 -   Google Cloud Load Balancer + Google Cloud Storage Bucket backend :
    Load Balancer not included in free tier.
 -   Oracle Cloud Free Tier : Generous VM sizes but no serverless
    solution.
 -   AWS CloudFront + S3 Storage : Generous free tier but configuration
    is quite complex.
 -   Cloudflare R2 + Page Rules : Generous free tier but confusing
    dashboard.
 -   Hetzner Cloud : Need a certain level of consumption to take
    advantage of the cheap VMs, and no serverless solution.
 There are a couple of smaller or niche cloud providers, but most of them
 do not have worldwide presence or do not have a good free tier. For
 those that do, it is not a serverless solution, so this was enough
 research for me.
 Ultimately I went with Cloudflare. It took me less than an hour to set
 up my Cloudflare account and billing, upload my files into R2, and then
 configure the one page rule I need to redirect www.clementchiew.me to
 the index.html file. It was pretty delightful to be able to hand over
 management of SSL certificates and have QUIC support right out of the
 gate. I do have my hestitations with Cloudflare, but being able to take
 advantage of Cloudflare\'s free R2 egress and free up my cognitive load
 of web server management is quite valuable to me.
 ## What\'s Next
 There have been so many changes in the past year, both worldwide and in
 my personal life. I have so much to write about and so many ideas that I
 want to note down. See me here again soon.
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 ::: navbar
 <div>
 [Prev](blog-016.html)
 </div>
 <div>
 [Next](blog-018.html)
 </div>
 :::
 > Home isn\'t where you\'re from, it\'s where you find light when all
 > grows dark.\
 > - Pierce Brown, Golden Son
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 ::: navbar
 <div>
 [Home](../index.html)
 </div>
 <div>
 [Blog](blog--01.html)
 </div>
 <div>
 [Git](https://renraku.dingo-bramble.ts.net/clement)
 </div>
 <div>
 [CV](../files/CV.pdf)
 </div>
 :::
 ------------------------------------------------------------------------
 <div>
 # We Need More Motivation
 </div>
 You know, like \"We need more pylons\", but with motivation, get it?
 Never mind. Like a running joke with my friend goes:\"The workshop is
 dead\". You know, the joke workshop. Tough crowd huh, never mind.
 Today would be about motivation, specifically the motivation to learn
 tech. I have been in \"tech\" for about 5 years now, what am I now? Or
 rather, what have I grown to be? If you\'re here something technical,
 probably time to click away. This sentence is added after I typed the
 rest, so warning that the article goes off the rails quite a bit.
 ## Learning Everything, Yet Learning Nothing
 As I reach a certain number in my age, I guess the responsibilities and
 realities of an adult starts to, as the increasingly distant \"young\"
 generation goes, \"gets real\". Without divulging a large part of what
 makes \"adulting\" in my personal life increasingly difficult, a larger
 part has been trying to continue to nurture and encourage myself to
 continue to learn tech. What does it even mean to \"learn\"?
 At this beautiful year of 2023, there never has been a more abundant
 year for technology in IT. The scourge of blockchain nonsense is dead,
 AI models are slowly growing to be more competent, and IT development
 methodologies are slowly breaking the ouroboros cycle of tooling
 madness. I still spend a bit of time every day reading about
 technologies, but I find myself increasingly distant from the what
 consitutes as \"learning\". At work, the responsibilities revolve about
 reading a ton of material, but none of them really let you get into the
 \"nitty gritty\" parts; the parts that truly explain what are you going
 to do, the parts that makes you actually grow. You learn everything, but
 yet you learn nothing.
 ## An Overview From Orbit
 The market is slowly disconnecting from each other. Companies are
 falling out of love with open source, and we the slaves to these
 technologies are facing an increasingly uphill battle to be relevant. As
 companies continue to consolidate their products and solutions, unless
 you\'re the lucky few to work at companies that are large enough to be
 included in acronyms, we no longer \"know\" the products we use. When
 you spin up a virtual machine on your cloud provider, are you still
 using a KVM hypervisor, or are you using a proprietary product that is
 compatible with KVM? When you use a S3 API to upload your blob files,
 what is going on in the sausage machine so that your files can now be
 seamlessly accessed from every part of the world? A \"Unix-compatible\"
 interface on a blob storage, how are these filesystem calls translated?
 We are increasingly led to learn about things that kind of makes sense,
 but also kind of don\'t. Your CI/CD needs workflows, pipelines, zones,
 frameworks, etc. Companies are increasingly saying, \"Shhh. Stop
 learning more, start understanding less. Trust the process and slip us
 some money while at that\".
 When all you learn is to be locked in to a company\'s product, how
 meaningful are your skills? A pianist can continue to play pianos from
 another brand, a shoemaker can just buy his tools from a generic company
 in China, a hammer-ist can just buy another hammer. Sure, you could just
 \"learn a new language\", you could just adapt to a new file syntax like
 yaml or HCL, but I\'d wager this is a situation unique to IT. Spending
 hundreds of hours finding the right kind of glue to bring products
 together, but spending zero time making sense because this terrible
 combination of products was decided by some C-suite who wants to \"turn
 things around\" in the company.
 Perhaps at this point you might be thinking, \"You are not not working
 for the right company\", \"You need a difference perspective\",
 \"You\'re terribly young and this is nothing new\" and I would be glad
 to be convinced so, but the water is starting to boil and I\'m not the
 only frog. I don\'t know what\'s the takeaway from this article other
 than a doomer-ist perspective. Perhaps it\'s a reflection on my dimming
 outlook of the world and global trends. Wars, famine, climate change,
 and more are here and in full force, but we are here in hour long
 meetings explaining how authentication tokens work to a senior engineer
 from the customer that has muted his mic and walked away from the
 laptop. Fun times ahead.
 ## Tailscale Is Cool
 It\'s cool, go check it out. It\'s like Hamachi from years past but way
 more useful. Now I can just use a Docker compose file to spin up my
 Gitea containers and expose the service with HTTPS already included with
 a Funnel. Tailscale, if you\'re reading this, please let me redirect my
 CNAME record to my funnel thanks.
 ------------------------------------------------------------------------
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 <div>
 [Prev](blog-017.html)
 </div>
 <div>
 [Next](blog-019.html)
 </div>
 :::
 > \"Life in this world,\" he said, \"is, as it were, a sojourn in a
 > cave. What can we know of reality? For all we see of the true nature
 > of existence is, shall we say, no more than bewildering and amusing
 > shadows cast upon the inner wall of the cave by the unseen blinding
 > light of absolute truth, from which we may or may not deduce some
 > glimmer of veracity, and we as troglodyte seekers of wisdom can only
 > lift our voices to the unseen and say humbly,\'Go on, do Deformed
 > Rabbit\... it\'s my favourite.\'\"\
 > - Didactylos, Small Gods
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 ::: navbar
 <div>
 [Home](../index.html)
 </div>
 <div>
 [Blog](blog--01.html)
 </div>
 <div>
 [Git](https://renraku.dingo-bramble.ts.net/clement)
 </div>
 <div>
 [CV](../files/CV.pdf)
 </div>
 :::
 ------------------------------------------------------------------------
 <div>
 # Seeking New Paths
 </div>
 ## It\'s Golang
 Oh wow, this is going to be a short one. I decided to pick up Golang on
 a whim and I am pleasantly surprised. I have picked up Golang a few
 times before, but it never clicked until this time, and oh boy did it
 click this time. I love the strongly-typed nature of the language, and
 how ergonomic everything is. Sure, there are some things that I would
 miss from Python like list comprehensions, but when Golang is blazing
 fast compiled, do I still miss them? I surely do not miss the
 pre-optimization going on in my head whenever I write Python.
 ## It\'s The Little Things
 Coming from the shithole called the Python packaging ecosystem, Golang
 set me free. No longer do I have to suffer from pip refusing to install
 packages, Poetry trying to do weird shit, using virtualenv to create
 \"safe\" spaces; Golang allows me to do the most important part of
 coding itself: the code. Dockerfiles with Python almost always devolve
 into some unholy incantation of pip and some demonic workaround to \"get
 it right\".
 No longer do I have to start thinking about how Python would shank me
 sideways for \"poor\" coding decisions; Golang coding styles are simple
 but straightforward. Golang tests all function calls to make sure that
 they match the type signatures. The development cycle is tight and fast.
 I just spend an hour yesterday reading about how Flask only has one
 event loop and one worker, how multiple requests are shared by one
 worker, oh-my-what-a-terrible-decision-please-use-ASGIS, worrying about
 having to move to a \"production\" quality server set up, and all that
 noise. If I have to read one more \"comprehensive\" guide on asyncio,
 threading, subprocesses, and how I need to do some convoluted set up
 just to get concurrency, I\'d rather just git init a new Golang project.
 On Golang, concurrency is already built into net/http.
 ## It\'s Coming I Swear
 After countless of dead projects that my hard drive only knows of, I
 feel like Golang has truly pushed my determination to places I\'ve never
 been before. It\'s exhilarating and exciting. Experienced Golang devs,
 let me have thismoment, before I crawl back into the depths of Python.
 ------------------------------------------------------------------------
 ::: navbar
 <div>
 [Prev](blog-018.html)
 </div>
 <div>
 [Next](blog-020.html)
 </div>
 :::
 > Woo-wee! Evil Morty! That was quite a scheme. Makes me wonder if
 > there\'s an evil me out there. But I guess, sometimes I look at my
 > life, and I may not even need 'im. Cuz, well, guess I made a pretty
 > big mess of things myself. Ooo eee. I never got my job at the
 > university back. Remember that? Rick made me do karate. It was kinda
 > funny, but I guess things went downhill from there. Started isolating
 > myself from Amy. Used to tell her everything I was feeling. But then I
 > guess I stopped. Cuz I wanted her to love who she thought I was, not
 > who I felt myself becoming. Ever think about how horrified the people
 > we love would be if they found out who we truly are? So we just dig
 > ourselves deeper, into our lies every day, ultimately only hurting the
 > people who were brave enough to love us. Wish I didn\'t do that. Wish
 > I was brave enough to love them back. I don\'t know. Maybe you should
 > try it. We don\'t have as much time as we think. Ooo eee.\
 > - Mr. Poopybutthole
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 ::: navbar
 <div>
 [Home](../index.html)
 </div>
 <div>
 [Blog](blog--01.html)
 </div>
 <div>
 [Git](https://renraku.dingo-bramble.ts.net/clement)
 </div>
 <div>
 [CV](../files/CV.pdf)
 </div>
 :::
 ------------------------------------------------------------------------
 <div>
 # Pushing New Boundaries
 </div>
 ## Hell Yeah It Is About Golang
 I\'ve always wanted to start project and properly finish it. Thanks to
 Golang and a heck ton of conversations with ChatGPT, I managed to make
 it happen. No more dead projects in the water, no more stranded code
 without an end in sight.
 So what is it? What have my grubby little fingers created by hammering
 these poor blue switches for over 3 months in my spare time? [A tarot
 reader that is](https://tarot.dingo-bramble.ts.net/index.html). Just a
 boring tarot reader. Yes, yes, it is done with \"AI\". Yes, it is done
 with GPT-3.5. Yes, yes, it is probably worse than those chatbot wrappers
 you get off Play Store that scams with a hefty annual subscription if
 you forget to cancel the free trial. You go the site, you \"talk\" via a
 text form to an entity that tells you ambiguous futures and whatnots
 about what\'s on your mind.
 ## How It Works
 It is pretty much a Golang chatbot that is prompted to talk like a tarot
 reader. I generated the tarot card set with Dall-E. Link it up with some
 basic Postgres tables to store conversation, put it behind
 Caddy+Tailscale Funnel to serve HTTPS traffic and that is pretty much
 all. Unimpressive, I know.
 ## But Why
 Because I can. But really, it is because I never \"knew\" front end
 development. In this age of Bootstrap, AngularJS, Tailwind, and whatever
 is going on with front end development, it has always felt that I am
 served the same thing but on different plates. This project has allowed
 me to go in depth on how many things came together. CSS styles, the
 Javascript DOM model, HTML divs, etc. Never had I spent so much time
 reading MDN and realized the wealth of knowledge that is available on
 it.
 ## Conclusion And Some More
 This project is not \"creative\". If you are against OpenAI, then this
 project is \"useless\" too. But it was not useless to me. The
 \"democratization\" of LLMs gave me the push forward to places I have
 not been before. LLMs was the teacher that I never had, and the
 assistant that could do \"that one thing\" that you never really
 understand.
 What about the poor artists I have ripped off? What about the treasure
 trove of knowledge that these LLMs were trained on that contains a ton
 of copyrights and IPs? Should I have stopped to wonder to wonder whether
 I should, before wondering whether I could? Is this code legitimately
 \"mine\"? I do not have the answers. But without the push from LLMs, the
 barrier of entry to the ever-changing landscape of tech has never been
 so accessible.
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 ::: navbar
 <div>
 [Prev](blog-019.html)
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 :::
 > "but what should we do when the highborn and wealthy take to crime?
 > Indeed, if a poor man will spend a year in prison for stealing out of
 > hunger, how high would the gallows need to be to hang the rich man who
 > breaks the law out of greed?"\
 > - Terry Pratchett, Snuff
Author	SHA1	Message	Date
Clement	478ded0e17	Fixed broken fetch	2024-10-13 22:16:37 +08:00
Clement	2bdda9ecc2	Test Pandoc markdown	2024-10-13 22:14:58 +08:00