James Read's Code, Containers & Cloud blog

I am so sick and tried of changing task management systems, I will just be using plain .txt files from now on.

In the last 10 years, I have tried so many different systems for organising my work and my personal life and yet I’ve not been able to keep using one of them after a few weeks or months. After all this time I think I’ve finally come to the realisation that they all suffer from the same inadequacies. Before anybody recommends me their favourite, here is a list of apps I’ve tried; RememberTheMilk (~2011), Trello, Google Keep (~2015), Google Tasks (~2022), Todoist (~2018 I think, but again in ~2023), and of course, because I am developer with a hammer (ie: the ability to write code), I had to write my own - wacky-tracky. I have probably had the most all around success with TaskWarrior (until recently).

This post is about how, and why, I use Git Annex to implement my 3-2-1 backup strategy backup strategy. In summary, that is;

• At least 3 copies of the data
• In at least 2 different storage mediums
• With at least 1 copy offsite

In practicality, I’ve used Git Annex to implement more like a 9-5-3 backup strategy and track everything nicely. This strategy should mean that I should not ever lose files that I care about ever again.

This article explains how I solved a couple of challenges of getting my initial environment and configs into Git — the first steps to GitOps.

I’ve been wanting to embrace GitOps for quite some time, but it’s always tricky to know where to start. Do I use Jenkins Jobs — I know Jenkins well? It’s a bit old school though, maybe I should be using Ansible Tower. I’ve heard things about ArgoCD, and lots of others. The truth is, I can’t do anything until I actually have my environment and configuration stored in Git.