It’s amazing to me the return on investment that comes from a company investing in themselves. Every month we’re given 2 days and the ability to focus on an area of experimentation that could align with our mission objectives.
July 2022 - Small team formed to discuss the topic “OSCAL”. That’s it - no prior solutioning or planning, just prior knowledge from a few on other R&D engagements that informed us OSCAL was a topic we wanted to look at.
Another wellbeing topic - as I believe people need reminders on a regular basis. This one being important to me because it comes from a conversation with a friend.
Self Perception: How do you perceive yourself - here and now - as well as where you believe you can go.
Self deprecating comments can be fun jokes at the expense of oneself and do no harm when you know the truth behind them. But the other side of the coin is that imposter-syndrome would not be a thing if not for doubt that lives in the minds of others.
New Year - same me. Everyone has a different opinion on Resolutions and aiming to be a better person/spouse/parent/etc. It’s admirable to have that mindset.
I’m far from alone in taking the stance that I am not a resolutions-person. I both don’t wait until the new years to start thinking about resolutions and I don’t wait until the new years to start doing them. I do it all the time - continuously.
I am always looking for ways to break the extreme fundamentals of air-gapped execution into modular chunks that make application in disconnected and connected environments more capable. If you solve for the air-gap, you’ve likely solved many other delivery and orchestration problems in connected environments.
If we are talking containerized workloads services, Zarf already handles a majority of the considerations for everything post-Kubernetes (Specifically everything after the cluster has been created). What that means is there is still a gap here - we need Highly-Available Kubernetes clusters in the air-gap, and we need to be very careful to document the dependencies that get us there.
(Picture of my co-author and I writing this post)
First off - this is meant to be a very light-hearted post. Something that I hope to impress on others is that Homelabs are a great opportunity to learn and grow your skills in new and relevant ways - but they come at the cost of being a labor of love. Something you maintain entirely in your free time and is best-effort to maintain and keep healthy.
When I was first getting ready to kick this blog off - I was looking for a unique domain name. I had already purchased brandtkeller.com and that is/was more than sufficient, but I loved the idea of something more playful and fun that added a little flare to the creation of content.
Listening to some Jocko Willink Podcasts while getting my indoor cycling session in and there was that common joke “so and so woke up and chose violence” and I laughed - then got curious if there something there to explore.
For those who adopted AI technologies early - this may not be the article for you. At the release of ChatGPT over a year ago now I was skeptical at best as to how it could make any meaningful difference to my day to day work and life. But I was wrong.
I wouldn’t say I am slow to adopt new trends - but there was soo much hype around LLM’s that it was difficult to tell noise from reality. It took me a few months and some encouragement from peers to really include AI in my every-day development. I’m writing this article in the event that there are still people who have not seen the productivity improvements that can be had by a few choice decisions.
My ability to learn about new technologies often comes with needing to play with pieces of a larger concept. I can do lots of reading and tutorial-based learning, but ultimately getting my hands into the different pieces is how I learn best.
I’ve been taking this approach with LLM’s and Generative AI in my HomeLab but….. this comes at a cost. I won’t begin to claim to know the difference in operation of Ai capabilities across GPU and CPU and how they compare… yet :wink:. But what I do know is that with resources I am actively testing (Chat / CodeGen) - I need GPU power.
I find it both fascinating and hilarious the impact of those of whom you interact with on a daily basis eventually begin to impact you and how you operate. From both mannerisms that begin to become common place among groups to the language you use to communicate with others.
Take for example language - the more effective examples of language and the impact that some language has where other examples fall flat. This is a great way to learn what does and doesn’t work while also striving to consume the leadership traits you find admiral.
Seems obvious for the engineering community but hear me out:
I believe something that all levels of engineers can benefit from is looking at abstract problems they encounter in their (or their companies) everyday function and trying to solve them in code. Yes a given technology may already exist to solve this problem and it is certainly worth evaluating it’s suitability for your needs - but what if you find a use case that hasn’t been solved for?