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.