Even tho the web is perfectly good platform to consume content, there’s something about not needing to leave the cozy darkness and simplicity of the terminal. Of course if you are like me and spend most of the time using terminal with IDE like neovim, you are very well accustomed to it and you don’t want to leave it. I got you. I’ve spend last few evenings porting this blog to be accessible with ssh....
Zig is interesting language for low level programming and I figured the best way how to learn it is to build something. Inspired by blog post I will try to beat the One billion rows challenge with it. It’s not going to be easy since Rust is the closest thing I’ve programmed in and even tho in some ways it’s close, zig is probably closer to C then to Rust. So let’s get to it...
Every project have to have some 3rd party dependencies, even if you are masochist and you are not using 3rd party packages/libraries, you are using compilers and tooling for the language you are developing in. If you wrote your own language, then this article is not for you. For everyone else, I want to show you why Nix is the best package manager for you projects and possible for your operating system....
Running Nixos on steamdeck come up as surprising necessity when I went for month long work retreat to Thailand. My workflow is composed of great and super lightweight Lenovo X1 Nano and remote workstation sitting in my office. Neovim running in ssh session with some port forwarding is all I need for my development, more about it some other post. But when I settled to the airbnb and fired up my laptop to do some work I was greeted by around 200ms ping to the office, not really acceptable for any serious work since every keystoke was like I was typing in slow motion....
Raft is consensus algorithm that’s being widely used in distributed stores and queues. It was designed to be easy to understand and to implement. For example it’s used by NATs the distributed lightweight queue system, or by etcd the distributed key value store used by Kubernetes. In this article I will try to reverse engineer Raft just by using this visualization , implement and explain how it works. I will not be reading the “Raft paper ” before finishing this project....
This weekend I wanted to explore Wireguard and the option to setup split tunnel inside my cluster to route some traffic to different country. This proved to be journey and a half. So let’s buckle up and dive in. Wireguard Wireguard is basically the standard of VPN tooling currently. It’s being used by a lot of zero trust and overlay networks like Tailscale and Netmaker. You can have it included in kernel or it can be used in user space with Wireguard-go, this gives it incredible flexibility of deployment....
Overlay network My homelab is currently using Tailscale which is awesome service and most homelaber are using it and I fully recommend it for anyone. But it’s not selfhosted and it’s not as flexible as I would like it to be. Netmaker is solid choice, but thanks to them modifying the /etc/hosts file, I’m unable to use it on nixos. OpenZiti great new option. Supporting all possible usecases and it can be selfhosted and it’s new way how to do zero trust networking....
For anyone working or wanting to work as SRE, devops or any other infrastructure related role, running homelab is the best thing you can do. You will get to experience hands on all of the pains and troubles that will prepare you perfectly to these roles. Plus is so much fun tinker with hardware. What’s a home lab? Anything… Literally anything can be your homelab. There are people running homelabs from raspberry pies, to whole racks full of servers and other hardware....