Foreword

I have worked in software development for over 10 years and in that time have always been drawn towards devops related tasks. It is only in the last 2 years that I’ve held the title “Devops Engineer”. I wanted to find the reason why I am drawn to this area of software development and what it even brings, in terms of value, to the teams and business’ who are supposed to benefit from it. The following blog post is my attempt to answer these questions. These are just my opinions and are heavily influenced by the books: “The Phoenix Project” by Gene Kim and John Willis, and “Flow” by Mihaly Csikyentmihaly.

I recently had the need to display a website on a spare monitor. The challenge was that I needed to show the website in full screen and the whole setup should persist even after a reboot of the computer running the browser.

Background

I’ve been wanting to extend my homelab capabilities with a server that I can quickly spin up virtual machines on. Proxmox seemed like a logical choice but I was undecided as to which hardware to run it on. Plus I had no idea where to put the machine so that I could have a free power socket for it and also be able to connect it to my home router. On top of that I was a little concerned about fire safety and energy consumption. I mentioned my thought process to a colleague and he suggested I try out a rented server from a company call Hetzner instead of buying my own. This sparked my interest and I decided to give it a go. I still wanted the convenience of being able to directly access the virtual machines from my home network so I went about researching how to create a site to site connection from my home network to a Hetzner rented server. The following is a step by step guide for setting up a wireguard server in a proxmox vm on a Hetzner server and using it to connect to a home network behind a fritzbox.

Background

I recently changed positions and moved from a pure software engineering role to a devops one. I’ve been working on devops task throughout my software development career and have always found them to be very rewarding hence the move. Plus I still inevitably have programming tasks when we need to customize a piece of software or create a completely custom tool (win win :)). I want to hone my devops skills so I thought a home lab would be in order. This post aims to document the process of creating a kubernetes control node on a Raspberry pi 5 I recently purchased.

So I’ve been working as a Devops engineer professionally for almost a year now. I’ve learned a lot and I want to put those skills to the test. This challenge is:

• Deploy a development environment with an IAC (Infrastructure as Code) tool.
• Create a test application comprising of a simple rest api backend and a html/javascript front end.
• Create a test, staging and production environment in which to deploy this test application.
• Setup a ci pipeline to automate the building and deployment of the application.
• Have some form of monitoring on the health of the application versions in each of the environments.
• Have the entire solution run locally on my raspberry pi 5.

I recently wanted to learn more about the SNMP (simple network management protocol). This protocol has been around for decades and is widely supported throughout the industry. For that reason it’s a useful protocol to consider when you want to monitor hardware in your network.

Background

We recently had a logarex smart electricity meter installed in our house to replace the old analogue one. This type of meter comes with an IR interface that you can query power comsumption values with. With a little help from an esp8266 and a IR reader/writer we should be able to make these values availabe on our home network.

So living in Germany you tend to accumulate a fair amount of documentation. What’s worse is that it all could be potentially important to some future beaurocratic process. I wanted to make the archiving of these documents digital and searchable. I haven’t really found any android application out there that does what I want so here I go down the road of trying to build my own. I want to see if I can leverage my dotnet knowledge and build a cross platform C# based application using the brand new .MAUI framework. Let’s see how it goes :)

I’ve been meaning to try out the very cool StereoKit on my Oculus device for a while now. As of yet there isn’t a ready made Visual Studio Template for creating and deploying to Android devices like there is for Hololens and UWP devices. I could just be patient and wait for Nick and the team to release the Android template or…….. I could try build the source code and example android project there in :). Ok, here we go:

For a while I’ve been meaning to tinker with MQTT and IOT in general. Although I’ve had a little exposure to the protocol in my work it’s mostly been on the software integration side. I wanted to try to program some hardware, namely the very cool esp8266 development board.

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