https://elder.dev/posts/ Recent content in Posts on elder.dev Hugo -- gohugo.io en-us Copyright © 2015-{year} Benjamin Elder. https://elder.dev/posts/hiking-with-your-dog/ Sat, 21 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000 https://elder.dev/posts/hiking-with-your-dog/ Bobby loves hiking https://elder.dev/posts/lazy-load-youtube/ Sat, 12 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000 https://elder.dev/posts/lazy-load-youtube/ ⓘ Note First, let me acknowledge up-front that this is neither a novel problem nor a novel solution. This is simply what I cobbled together to fit my own needs, I thought I’d share about how this went / works. Why Lazy Load? YouTube is a pretty ubiquitous for video hosting and very easy to embed. For most videos you can just open the video on youtube.com, click “share”, click “embed”, and finally copy + paste the generated <iframe> into your page source. https://elder.dev/posts/open-source-virtual-background/ Thu, 09 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000 https://elder.dev/posts/open-source-virtual-background/ With many of us around the globe under shelter in place due to COVID-19 video calls have become a lot more common. In particular, ZOOM has controversially become very popular. Arguably Zoom’s most interesting feature is the “Virtual Background” support which allows users to replace the background behind them in their webcam video feed with any image (or video). I’ve been using Zoom for a long time at work for Kubernetes open source meetings, usually from my company laptop. https://elder.dev/posts/digging-into-etcd/ Sun, 01 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://elder.dev/posts/digging-into-etcd/ What Is etcd? etcd, /ˈɛtsiːdiː/, per the official site is: A distributed, reliable key-value store for the most critical data of a distributed system Per the FAQ etcd’s name means “distributed etc directory”. With etc being a reference to the Unix directory for system-wide configuration /etc, and d being a reference to “distributed” 1. The d is perhaps also a pun on the long history of naming daemons with a d suffix (see: httpd, ntpd, systemd, containerd, …), though I’ve not yet found proof of this. https://elder.dev/posts/self-driving-debian/ Sun, 01 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://elder.dev/posts/self-driving-debian/ For my home server I’ve come to appreciate using it rather than maintaining it 😏 After replacing some parts starting over I really wanted it to be fully “self-driving” to the extent possible – primarily meaning totally unattended and automatic updates. No manual maintenance. Automated Updates Debian 10 “Buster” 🐶 ships with the unattended-upgrades package installed out of the box, but it needs a little configuring to achieve what we want. https://elder.dev/posts/california-is-beautiful/ Wed, 14 Aug 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://elder.dev/posts/california-is-beautiful/ Just a few select photos from a short trip away from it all … https://elder.dev/posts/safer-bash/ Mon, 08 Apr 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://elder.dev/posts/safer-bash/ Bash scripts are a really convenient way to write simple utilities. Unfortunately many bash scripts in the wild are littered with bugs. Writing reliable bash can be hard. I’ve been reviewing and fixing a lot of bash while working on cleaning up the Kubernetes project’s scripts and wanted to collect some tips for writing more reliable scripts. Use ShellCheck ShellCheck is an excellent open source linter for shell capable of detecting many errors. https://elder.dev/posts/avoiding-burnout/ Sun, 17 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://elder.dev/posts/avoiding-burnout/ This post may come off a bit ironic, coming from someone who burned out pretty hard recently, but I received some really good advice and I hope it can help someone else. Some of the advice I received: Set boundaries, reserve time for yourself Don’t feel guilty for not responding right away. Even if you work on Open Source fulltime, don’t let it become a “second job”, take time for yourself. https://elder.dev/posts/mapping-appalachia/ Wed, 31 Oct 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://elder.dev/posts/mapping-appalachia/ ✎ Update It’s worth noting that I did not wind up playing Fallout 76 much more. After the B.E.T.A. my interest fell off quickly as the locations and quests failed to be as engaging for me as previous Fallout games. I do not recommend Fallout 76 to anyone. October 30th B.E.T.A. (Break-It Early Test Application) During the first B.E.T.A. some places I discovered along my travels were: https://elder.dev/posts/gitops-all-the-things/ Sun, 23 Sep 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://elder.dev/posts/gitops-all-the-things/ You should use GitOps for everything. Everything. GitOps is a recent-ish term for: use declarative configuration for your infrastructure (e.g. Kubernetes) version all of your configuration in source control (I.E. Git) use your source control to drive your infrastructure (I.E. use CI/CD = Ops) GitOps: versioned CI/CD on top of declarative infrastructure. Stop scripting and start shipping. https://t.co/SgUlHgNrnY — Kelsey Hightower (@kelseyhightower) January 17, 2018 Why? - Well, do you like the sound of: https://elder.dev/posts/slackmoji-anywhere/ Sun, 09 Sep 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://elder.dev/posts/slackmoji-anywhere/ I use slack a lot to communicate with other Kubernetes contributors, and I’m a fan of the emoji reaction feature for reacting to posts without notifying everyone in the group. Positive emoji responses in particular are a simple way to acknowledge messages and make discussions more friendly and welcoming. slack emoji reaction example (thanks dims!) A particularly fun part of this feature is custom emoji support, commonly known as “slackmoji”, which allows adding arbitrary images (and even gifs! https://elder.dev/posts/brewing-with-kubernetes/ Sun, 04 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://elder.dev/posts/brewing-with-kubernetes/ My coffee pot is now a node in my home Kubernetes cluster, and it’s awesome. More specifically the Raspberry Pi wired to my CoffeePot controller now runs on Kubernetes thanks to kubeadm in a cluster with the node running my site. I set up a public live status page displaying all of the sensor data as well as the last update time, with control restricted to users on my local network. https://elder.dev/posts/migrating-my-site-to-kubernetes/ Sun, 04 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://elder.dev/posts/migrating-my-site-to-kubernetes/ Previously when I brought my my site back online I briefly mentioned the simple setup I threw together with Caddy running on a tiny GCE VM with a few scripts — Since then I’ve had plenty of time to experience the awesomeness that is managing services with Kubernetes at work while developing Kubernetes’s testing infrastructure (which we run on GKE). So I decided, of course, that it was only natural to migrate my own service(s) to Kubernetes for maximum dog-fooding. https://elder.dev/posts/prow/ Tue, 26 Dec 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://elder.dev/posts/prow/ Prow - extended nautical metaphor. Go Gopher originally by Renee French, SVG version by Takuya Ueda, modified under the CC BY 3.0 license. Ship's wheel from Kubernetes logo by Tim Hockin. The Kubernetes project does a lot of testing, on the order of 10000 jobs per day covering everything from build and unit tests, to end-to-end testing on real clusters deployed from source all the way up to ~5000 node scalability and performance tests. https://elder.dev/posts/automata/ Sat, 03 Jun 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://elder.dev/posts/automata/ JavaScript is required to view the demos in this post.Please enable JavaScript. I am fascinated by automation, both mechanical and software. A particularly interesting form of automation is Automata. While the earliest usage of the term referred to mechanical devices, in Computer Science ‘automata’ and automata theory include abstract machines instead of physical devices. Where a physical automaton might be constructed of complex gears and clockwork, an abstract automata is constructed of state and rules that define how state is updated in each iteration or ‘generation’ of the automata. https://elder.dev/posts/hello-again/ Sun, 19 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://elder.dev/posts/hello-again/ Hello World! I am now the proud owner of bentheelder.io. If you are curious, you can find the page source for the new site here, and the scripts used to set up the GCE VM here. The new site is also now on Cloudflare for performance and security. The old site will be redirected to this one soon, and what little content it had has been preserved here. The pages have been reformatted to match the new site, and should be much easier on the eyes. https://elder.dev/posts/creaturebox/ Sat, 02 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://elder.dev/posts/creaturebox/ CreatureBox is a simple evolutionary obstacle avoidance demo I wrote inspired by studio otoro’s awesome creatures avoiding planks. I wanted to build something similar for fun and try out golang’s Go mobile project as well, so over the break between semesters I took a little time to write one. gomobile The first thing I did was get gomobile up and running, and create a basic main loop to handle events and draw a quad to the screen during paint events. https://elder.dev/posts/rust-hotswap/ Mon, 12 Jan 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://elder.dev/posts/rust-hotswap/ ⚠ Warning This post is old! Rust has changed a lot since this post was written, it may not still be accurate. Mozilla’s Rust language has just reached 1.0 alpha. I’ve been learning it off and on for a while now, and I’m quite happy to see the breaking changes slow down. As part of learning rust I’ve played around implementing things that would be normally done in c or c++; one of those is the old trick of hot-swapping code by reloading a shared library at runtime.