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Lodra

@ Lodra @programming.dev

Posts
11
Comments
319
Joined
3 yr. ago

  • Company forgets why they exist after 11-week migration to Kubernetes

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  • The CEO now seeks help from Phutar Afrayughum, a psychic and extrasensory perception specialist who allegedly helped Google increase their marketshare in the messaging app market, and was also involved in developing the Material Design framework.

    Seems like a legit article :shrug:

  • Introducing Notes, Files, Schedule, Vault, and Polls!

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  • As someone who can make some fairly well educated guesses about the programming.dev infra and effort, I find this entire project is kinda fascinating. Keep it up!!!

    Do you have any public info available on the operating costs (time + money)? How do you fund everything?

  • Encrypted hard drive asking for password every time

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  • I recently dug into this because I accidentally trashed my wife’s OS which was encrypted with bitlocker. PITA btw and I couldn’t beat the encryption

    Bitlocker encryption key hash is stored in 2 possible places. First is an unencrypted segment of the encrypted drive. This is bad because it’s pretty easy to read that hash and then decrypt the drive. The second place is on a Trusted Platform Module (TPM) which is a chip on the motherboard. This is better because it’s much more difficult to hack. It can be done but requires soldering on extra hardware to sniff the hash while the machine boots up. Might even be destructive… I’m not sure.

    Either way a motivated attacker can decrypt the drive if they have physical access. For my personal machines, I wouldn’t care about this level of scrutiny at all.

    Anyways you can see if any open source solutions support TPM.

  • Trying to update the email address on numerous accounts, and 9/10 require that I call or contact support via email to get that done.

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  • I recently changed my personal email. Updated every account I knew of (thanks Bitwarden!!). Updated about 120 accounts, closed maybe 20, and 5 or so can’t be changed.

    Of the ~120 that I changed, I think about half of them were easy to change. Not much confusion. There was a clear enough process. Etc. Most of the rest were difficult to change but I could do so on my own eventually.

    Something like ~10 accounts required emails and phone calls to support.

    A few were terrible. Things like updating my email address in 10 places for one account. Or the updates go fine but just didn’t work, requiring many repeat attempts or phone calls.

    So it’s a real problem in my experience. But not the norm. Maybe 1/10 rather than 9/10

  • What are your favorite tools for monitoring Linux and individual docker containers?

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  • OpenTelemetry

  • Five Ways to Be More Productive with Git

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  • (Almost) Every infrastructure decision I endorse or regret after 4 years running infrastructure at a startup

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  • First is complexity. A simple helm chart works great but more elaborate charts can turn into a maintenance problem. This is especially when managing a large number of apps and need to establish and maintain standards across them. E.g. you want to add a new label to every helm chart you use. You now get to making 60 PRs for 60 charts. Or you can tie them all together with chart dependencies. This can be done well but almost never is. It's just too easy to build a bad helm chart. Kustomize allows you to do this from a "top-down" perspective

    Second is modifications. Consider as an example that you want to run filebeat as a sidecar container on some pod to capture its logs. But the helm chart you're using doesn't include this feature. You have two choices: modify the pod when it's created with a mutatingwebhook or similar (super complicated solution) or you can copy/fork the chart, add the functionality, and maintain it going forward. Kustomize just doesn't have this problem. You can just modify a base manifest with overlays.

    Last is the nature of Go templates which helm charts are based on. Everything outside of {{ }} is just plaintext. This leads to a ton of limitations. Got a whitespace issue? You'll probably find out at runtime. Want your IDE to identify syntax issues, provide, intellisense, etc. on the final manifest? Good luck! You need to render that chart first. With Kustomize, every manifest is structured text (yaml). So you get the benefits of all standard tooling for yaml data in your IDEs and CI/CD pipelines.

    Honestly, I could keep going (helm releases ugghhhh!). But helm definitely wins on one point and it's a big one; Helm is the standard for distributing k8s manifests. So every meaningful project supplies helm charts. Kustomize doesn't even come close on this one. That said, I think Kustomize manifests are just simpler to build. So having an official base manifest for every project just doesn't matter too much.

  • So You Think You Know Git? - FOSDEM 2024

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  • I started using git meaningfully about 10 years ago. Mercurial maybe 6 years ago but not very much. And I was not a fan. Especially how it tracks things recursively.

    So honest question. Why?

  • Book recommendations for cosmic horror on a spaceship

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  • The Locked Tomb series! It’s excellent. The first book is Gideon the Ninth.

    It’s not exactly the right genre but I think it’s pretty close. Many people describe it as lesbian necromancers in space. But that’s a poor description IMO. More like mystery novels with a side of horror featuring necromancers in space. The lesbian aspect is very minor though certainly relevant to the plot.

  • (Almost) Every infrastructure decision I endorse or regret after 4 years running infrastructure at a startup

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  • This is excellent. I may copy the rough format for tracking things internally at my company!

    Btw, I agree with most of your decisions in here with just a few exceptions.

    • kustomize > helm
    • Argo > flux

    My last thought is less clear though. There are good observability solutions besides datadog. Grafana Cloud is great. Honeycomb has a similar offering. But all are pretty expensive though.

    If you aren’t using OpenTelemetry, you’re probably doing observability wrong!

  • Introducing Pkl, a programming language for configuration

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  • Disclaimer: I don’t yet understand why this is valuable.

    I looked through the yaml example a bit. It looks pretty rough. This really makes familiar and readable yaml into much longer configuration. It’s much harder to read. First impression is a pass.

  • Deleted

    What are your favorite extensions for Python development?

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  • Well I’m not doing much python development anymore. But I was a big fan of the black formatter!

  • What are your thoughts on the Arc browser?

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  • Oh really??? I wonder if there’s hope for chrome after all. Though I’m still sticking with Firefox 🙂

  • US scientist recommends adding salt to make perfect cup of tea - BBC News

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  • Nope!

    I’m 100% against microwaving water to heat it up. And it’s completely unreasonable! But I really won’t do it at all and scoff at those that do 😁

    I’m also perfectly happy to use a microwave for any other purpose. As far as I understand, it’s actually one of the healthier methods to cook food.

  • What are your thoughts on the Arc browser?

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  • Here’s a random article on the topic to get you started.

    Basically Google is destroying anonymous web browsing by embedding finger printing in chromium. Certain trusted servers will track your identity and report whether or not it trusts you.

    It’s actually very similar to how Single Sign On and identity providers work. Except you aren’t choosing to use it with a “login with Facebook” or similar button. It’s forced on you by the browser

  • What are your thoughts on the Arc browser?

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  • With chromium being poisoned last year and Mozilla trying to diversify away from Firefox, I’m starting to wonder what browser I should be using in the near future. So I’d really like to hear some opinions on arc browser!

    EDIT: Aaand it’s chromium

  • Legendary Half-Life YouTuber plans class-action lawsuit against Ubisoft for killing The Crew

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  • Fair enough regarding sass, though I disagree with the opinion.

    But I’m asking about builders of partial software. For example, consider a single developer that builds a really great library for handling tables. It displays a grid, displays text in cells, maybe performs some operations between cells, etc. On its own, this software is useless but is very useful for other people to build other products. Should it be illegal to sell this software?

  • Amsterdam landlord ordered to lower rent for tiny, leaky room from €1,950 to €95 per month

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  • No. There are good landlords. They’re definitely small scale. Normal homeowners that are able to scale their efforts to a few rental units. There’s also a real need for renting rather than owning.

    The real problems are all large scale landlords and also bad landlords (of all sizes) that overcharge, abuse tenants, forgo maintenance, etc.

  • Legendary Half-Life YouTuber plans class-action lawsuit against Ubisoft for killing The Crew

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  • Hmm I may be confused. Do you believe that software companies shouldn’t be allowed to build and sell libraries? I.e. They should only be allowed to sell full products, ready for an end user?