sharing your
- thoughts and
- findings
with others was as simple as writing a Github gist?
Vladilen Kozin vkz
This [hoot][] you're about to read started its life as a gist of technical minutae I had to discover to Tailscale cloud and on-prem resources. It'd be too boring for me to just publish it, so I thought I'd give a little bit of context as a preamble. I get to rant some and you can simply skip to the technical sections below if you'd rather not indulge me.
How much of what AWS gives you do you really truly need? It's become Kubernetes this, Docker that. I rarely question it when contracting because contractors usually arrive after the fact to pick up and carry the pieces. You get to target the infrastructure that may as well have been installed by alients before humankind ascended in Amazon. All in the cloud, can't touch, jumpbox this, terraform that, re-create the world every time you sneeze, etc. It's different when you're hired fo
We continue with our tailscailing git.ht chronicle with this follow up [hoot][]. I'll leave philosophising for later posts to keep this one short and sweet. Let us briefly address Q1 of the Homework I left for the curious reader.
To recap. We have a web-server deployed on-prem. We sprinkle a tiny bit of [tailscale][] magic to make AWS Application Load Balancer route requests to that on-prem resource as if it were a normal load-balancing target, which really it is. And, when I say "server" what I mean, obviously, is an old laptop on my desk, duh. If you want to try it at home, go back to the previous episode in the series. Towards the end I left you with a couple of questions, so today we'll address the first one: >A
Or rather why blog with a gist. [git.ht][] is a very simple and minimal service. One I created for myself, mostly with my needs and requirements in mind. When all said and done, [git.ht][] is closest to a "blogging" platform[^1]. Kind of. Idea is to minimize transactional costs of having an idea you want to put in writing or a bunch of technical notes, research or findings that you deem close enough to be shared and actually reaching your audience. Of which, of course, you may not even have any, yet. Bit of a chicken and egg problem. Until you start publishing, you won't have an audience; until you get your first readers your audience won't grow and you won't have that gratifying feedback loop that nudges you to write more. Finally, writing more means practice; practice makes you better; more p
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June 6, 2023 20:17
What does SSH has to do with GitHoot, blogging and AWS CloudFront? CDN caching is vital for static resources like blog posts or RSS and Atom feeds. They can be tricky to setup when you need to re-deploy every time you change anything cache related in your code. SSH can help with that. In this blog post we'll configure CloudFront caching live, ri…
[git.ht][] relies heavily on CDN caching. We use AWS CloudFront, but it'll work similarly for CloudFlare or another CDN. Hardly a surprise seeing how [GitHoot][] is almost but not quite a blogging platform. There are a few good candidates for caching. We emphasize and nudge people towards RSS, cause, let's face it - RSS (or Atom) delivers cleaner and superior experience to your readers compared to whatever blog central du jour is in vogue. But then this knowledge, quite common in 1990s-00s, is rapidly going away. That aside. RSS feed is nothing more than an XML document. Naturally, we'll want to cache it. These feeds are unlikely to change often, I mean, how often do you blog? Not often enough, if you ask me, go check out [git.ht][] right now. Once we fetch your GitHub gists, we turn them into hoots - pages
Now that I've committed a few of my experiences launching [git.ht][] to a written word, a pattern has emerged in a way I approach DevOps. By happy coincidence it also acquired a name of its own. As I was writing [episode 3][] in the series, I guess, my brain must've gaffed and so the term TailOps was born, where clearly I meant to write DevOps. [Tailscale][] has become a vital part of GitHoot's infrastructure that ties everything together - only natural that my mind slipped. I'm having trouble resetting my brain, so I guess I'm stuck with it. It got me thinking. It is admittedly fuzzy and ill defined and likely to remain thus. Wouldn't hurt to explore and reflect some. Then, who knows, TailOps might just become a thing and start a life of its own.
Let's make this [hoot][] one, where I indulge in philosophy, make hand-wavy statements and share observations supported by like a single data point. My hoot - my rules. Here goes.
Is the title clickbaity and iflammatory enough? FWIW I wasn't the one to express the sentiment nor do I share it. This [hoot][] was prompted by the Twitter exchange that you can see on the side here. Which, I believe, got triggered by yet another Elon-induced Twitter-verse drama. It was rate-limiting this time. This happens often enough now that I just put the phone aside and come back when emotions settle down and the service works again. I for one think Twitter and micro blogging in general absolutely have room to exist even when, personally, I'm more partial to longer form writing, where longer need not apply to the word cound you output necessarily. In my experience there is correlation between how much thought you put in vis-a-vis how many coherent paragraphs you produce. Anyway, back to RSS and Gen-Z.
I finally gave in and decided I should take LLMs for a serious spin. Not quite ready to surrender to the likes of GitHub Copilot but I feel like the time has come to give em enough room in my toolkit to truly evaluate their potential. I've largerly remained on the sidelines of the most recent LLM drama as it evolved into a more or less global phenomenon. I can't even tell if we've reached the top of the hype and riding the wave or still climbing - my Twitter has been drowning in all things LLM for months now. It basically rendered For You feed useless - no human can keep up with updates coming in so frequently, nor can one accurately judge their significance. I haven't had a chunky enough task to try them in earnest anyway. Until now. See, I have a severe case of *busine
Every time I touch frontend and do any sort of programming for the web, it leaves me near tears. Moment I venture out of the cozy backend into the insanity of the whole client - server interaction ... yaks - yaks everywhere. Latest offender is, well, forms. I feel like much of the well designed things happened early when www was only just making an appearance and since then we've squandered it. Or the designs ended falling on their faces when confronted with evil agents and spam.
As I see it, there are four primary types of user interactions through forms:
