I was surprised when reading the changelog for Salt 3007.0 , regarding several deprecated modules to be removed in 3009.0. I also later read some of the policy changes on their blog. Going forward, they are planning on having a much smaller core module, and will be moving a lot of larger modules to external repositories.

I started using Salt while I was at Kotagent, and quite liked the way it worked. Even though a lot of teams at my current company use Ansible, I never enjoyed using it, and somewhat forced my team to switch to Salt (this was easy because my team was mostly just me). I think Salt tried to include too much into its core, and over time it feels like the increase maintenance burden resulted in a product that moves slow and was hard to improve. I hope having a cleaner core, and moving a lot of modules out will result in being able to have a more reliable core, while keeping it easy to extend via the various types of modules.

Loosely inspired by xinetd , I wrote a simple dev proxy launcher.

Nine Years

I have now been in Japan for 9 years. Japan is far from a perfect company and there are plenty of bits that cause irritation at times, but overall I feel like my normal day to day is pretty good. This past year definitely had some ups and downs and I have quite a lot to consider moving into 2024.

Winter Break

I had a number of paid holidays accumulated that were due to expire if I did not use them, so this year I have an extra long winter holiday. I have continued to use some of it tinkering around with various bits of my site. I am still using mqtt and saltstack to automate parts of my dev environment.

Rust has been on my list of things to learn for quite a while, and recently I have started to actually start learning it. I started with the Rust Book online, working through a chapter at a time, mostly during my weekly MokuMokuKai . After finishing the first I/O project I also went through the rust cli book to further check some of my understanding before moving on.

Right now I’m taking a short break from the book to experiment with a few small CLI applications in Rust to check my understanding. I use mqtt for many of my other projects, so one of my first small project is a set of mqtt tools to tail a server or send simple payloads. I am also reworking my worklog script and rewriting it from Swift into Rust to continue practicing. While I like Swift as a language, and there are libraries to help write a CLI, it feels like Rust might be better for the specific wrapper tools I want to write. Perhaps this will also lead towards me replacing Hugo with something else that is a bit easier to work with. Something like Zola could work if I want to keep it a static site, but I’m also thinking about going with a Django site this time.

I would not be the first engineer to joke that those working in devops have become yaml engineers. In small amounts, yaml is not terrible, and provides a human readable way to handle simple configuration. At some point we jumped the shark and now it’s yaml all the way down .

(I have seen a few projects use something like jsonnet for configuration which quickly goes from turtles all the way down to Cthulhu)

I have plenty of bias, but one of the biggest offenders in my opinion is Kubernetes, and it’s one of several reasons I have trouble bring myself to adopt it. It is nearly impossible to escape yaml and even tools like Salt (which I still use) and Ansible are also programmed in yaml.

Like many, when bored I tend to pick up my phone and start fiddling with it or I pull up things on my ipad. Both devices are useful at times, but I should also reduce the amount of passive time on them.

A while back, I recall reading about someone who enabled grayscale mode on their phones to help make things more boring. I decided to do my own similar experiment. Since most of my devices are Apple, the process is similar.

I often have all kinds of ideas flying around my head but have no idea when I might even try to prioritize it. Sometimes I want to keep track of some high level todos somewhere and a page here is probably sufficient. Listing here makes no claims about when I will actually prioritize it.

• Build my own CalDav server to manage todos. I have some strong opinions on how a todo app should work for me, and I naively think I still want something built on open protocols like caldav. I have a prototype that works, but also trying to get it to work properly with Apple’s CalDav implementations (via EventKit) has a lot of quirks and some missing features.
• Own blogging engine. I do not enjoy using Hugo, but I do like the workflow of being able to write posts in Markdown on almost any editor. I have some wild ideas on how to combine the two but have not actually sat down to plan it out. I think I would also like to add ActivityPub as a way of handling comments but this is probably just asking for extra complexity.
• Learn Rust. Some parts of rust look messy from a syntax perspective, but it’s a language that many people seem excited about. I think I should start by learning some basic rust, and writing some simple CLI tools in it.
• Home Automation. I’m only using HomeAssistant in very minimal ways, but I like the idea of putting some sensors around my apartment to let me know the status of things. I’ve added some temperature/humidity/co2 sensors to a few rooms, but there are probably more things I could improve on.
• Create a game. After graduating university, I started coding a small 2D game in .NET as a way to learn the language. As soon as I got a job, I stopped working on it (and now probably could not even get it to build) but I’ve often wanted to create something. I still think I want to do something in 2D, in the style of a mini rogue like mixed with something like Yoda Stories (an older game I have fond memories of). I think it would be fun messing with the code to randomize small maps that could be completed in 15~30 minutes or so.
• Alto Saxophone When I was in middle school, I was forced by my parents to take part in band and at the time I greatly disliked it. I very briefly tried to pick it up a bit around univeristy but never practiced to any extent. Every once in a while, I think I would like to pick it up again, but my saxophone is at my parents’ house and there’s not an easy way to get it here.

I have been experimenting with various habit tracking and home automation prototypes for quite a while. While I like the idea of having smart buttons around my house, they are a bit expensive for what I want to do with them, and I have not yet had luck getting an IKEA Tradfri button working. A few weeks ago, I recalled the NFC tag support in Home Assistant and wondered if I could use that.