technically correct*

I was running out of space on my old NAS, so, instead of doing the sensible thing of just buying larger drives, I decided to buy larger drives and build a new storage server.

Part two of the network upgrades sees some new 10G switches and transitioning most of the core machines to 10G links.

Coming up with general solutions for Advent of Code is challenging when you only have access to one input. I've attempted to solve this by generating admissible inputs of my own.

Every year, I aim to complete Advent of Code in the shortest overall runtime while being able to solve any given input. This year I did it in both rust and python. These are some observations/musings.

A network overhaul was long overdue, and I've upgraded to a setup that is modular, upgradeable, and more performant than what I had previously.

A question I've been asking recently is: in a world of (mostly) free SaaS CI/CD services (like GitHub actions and GitLab CI), why would I go through the effort of hosting my own?

As I've been writing a bit more, I revisited the static site generation landscape and decided to give Zola a try. My reasons revolved mainly around my frustrations with hugo's templating after a recent attempt to add resized images to another post.

Several months ago, a server I'd be using for nearly a decade decided to call it quits. I made plans to replace that machine by building a new one with modern hardware, but those plans quickly spiraled into redoing most of my cluster.

This is a success story of running a medium-sized rust project (>25k lines) for roughly two years in production and developer environments. Included are the objectives, challenges faced, and general learnings and observations.

When I was first starting my career, I was fortunate enough to have the choice between three companies. Only now do I fully appreciate just how lucky I was to have "gone with my gut" and picked the one I did.

IMVU's offer to me was $5k less than my other offers (I sucked at negotiating), and their product was not something I was interested in. Explaining the product to someone was never straightforward: "who would actually pay for virtual pants?" But, what they lacked in brand sexiness they made up for in engineering culture.