James Read's Code, Containers & Cloud blog

I’ve been using vim on a daily basis since about 2011, when I started my first job as a systems engineer. The reason that I picked up Vim in the first place was that I was using Linux on a day to day basis (CentOS 5, if you wanted to know), across many different servers - and I wanted to edit files over ssh on those servers. While Nano was fine, and I could use it, it was a colleague using Vim that encouraged me to give it a go.

I really like YouTube, and I first remember using it back in 2008 or so. It’s a fantastic platform for getting to new content, even though it’s run in a way that goes against a lot of my personal preferences (lots of tracking, lots of advertising, some questionable policies). For non-paying users, Free YouTube is absolutely invested with ads. It’s basically unusable. Unfortunately I was forced to switch to YouTube premium a while ago because there are several content creators I really like, where their content isn’t posted elsewhere.

This evening finally marks the completion of the migration of https://docs.olivetin.app to a new build system, called Antora. OliveTin’s documentation consists currently of 126 AsciiDoc files, 50 images, and many example config files, code examples, and similar. I would not say it is a very large documentation site, like OpenShift or any of the Red Hat documentation that I spend a lot of time reading (also written in AsciiDoc), but it’s a decent size that has been built up over the last 3 years.

So many interactions with friends, family and coworkers now happen via our chat apps, and so many of the best bits of these chats just scroll by and are forgotten. Faridoon is a simple app that lets you save and publish your favourite chat quotes for you to save, for your community, or for the world to see. I was inspired to write Faridoon a long time ago, when I was chatting with friends mostly on Mumble chat.

The bluey-grey color that you see in nearly all of my projects has the HTML color code #dee3e7. It came from the very first “real” web project I worked on when I was about 16 years old, and I knew nothing! That website has had so many versions over the years, but it’s first version was built with PHP4.3, XHTML 1.0/HTML4.01 and CSS2.1 - and it was a mess! But I loved it, it taught me so much about web development, and it was my gateway into the world of web programming.

In my very first job interview out of University, I was asked a question that I have never forgotten. The interviewer asked me “What skills do you think you have, that other people don’t?”. Context is important, I was 21, I’d never had a professional job in IT before, and I was applying for a job as a Systems Engineer. What came to mind quite quickly, was that I’ve been programming since I was about 11 or 12 years old, and it’s given me an appreciation for why software fails.

This post is written simply for myself to mark the date when I fully decided to ditch Ansible’s containers.podman.podman_containers, and Podman’s nasty port of docker-compose, in favour of Quadlet. Hopefully this page can serve as a useful reference for others considering the same move. Problems with containers.podman.podman_containers Ansible is great, but it’s a pain if you ssh on to a server, to find a container is down. You then have to jump on to another server to run the playbook to start the container.

I aggressively use Prometheus in my day-to-day life, not just for regular technical and application metrics, but for everything I can get an exporter for. I have a Prometheus exporter for my Gmail inbox (personal and work), for my Google calendar (mostly work), all my websites I’ve written export prometheus metrics, I monitor my servers CPU and Memory usage with Prometheus metrics, but also their Hard Drive SMART status. I even have a Prometheus exporter for my fledgling weight loss program.

Sometimes you need to write a HTML webpage that is based on some sort of data file, like YAML files. Rather than having a server-side script generate the HTML, you can generate the HTML page statically, making it easier to host and cache. I thought about writing a tool myself to do this, but thankfully, I found Gomplate. It is a powerful Go-based template renderer that allows you to generate dynamic content from various data sources, including YAML files.

This week was totally normal and routine for me, I’m sitting here on a Friday thinking that it’s been the same as many other weeks I’ve had in my life as a Tech Seller at Red Hat. Enjoyable, busy, varied, etc. However, I am noticing a change in how I go about my week - that change is that more and more of my colleagues are using AI. On the one hand this is fantastic, the democratisation of AI, led by services like ChatGPT mean that anyone without any technical background or grounding in the principles of AI doesn’t have to worry about HOW any of those services work, they use use them.