James Read's Code, Containers & Cloud blog

I’m 37 today (2025), but I started coding for the web 26 years ago at around 11 (~1999). That’s “26 years of web developer experience,” but I’ve realised it also bred an unhelpful belief about how to write frontend code. I started with Windows Notepad at school, producing HTML pages for Internet Explorer 4. Early tools included Dreamweaver (pre-Macromedia) and Microsoft FrontPage. Without a FrontPage license at home, I used Microsoft Publisher (yes, the desktop publishing app).

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 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.