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Some Audax Ireland folks mentioned this one was running, and once I looked it up it was an easy yes: on the 10th of August I’ll be on the start line in Antwerp for BOB, the Borders of Belgium and Luxembourg , a 1000km BRM organised in partnership with Randonneurs Belgique. What Is BOB BOB is a 1,029km Brevet Randonneurs Mondiaux event: non-competitive, self-navigated,…
The Easter Fleche At the Easter Fleche this year I had a puncture. I swapped in a fresh TPU tube roadside, pulled out the Silca Impero Ultimate II and pumped it up. Everything felt fine. I got back on the bike and finished the event without further incident. The Silca Impero Ultimate II mounted on the bike. The Eoin McLove 600 A few weeks later I rode the Eoin McLove 600 . Six hundred kilometres,…
I have been riding audax events for a few years now. If you are not familiar with the sport, audax (also called randonneuring) is long-distance unsupported cycling. Rides are called brevets and they come in standard distances: 200, 300, 400, and 600 km. You ride within a time limit, collect stamps at checkpoints, and that is it. No racing, no prizes, just you and the road. Like most randonneurs, I…
I’m excited to share a new project I’ve been working on: pvmlab . pvmlab is a CLI tool designed to automate the setup of a simple, reproducible virtual pxeboot provisioning lab directly on macOS. It leverages the power of QEMU , socket_vmnet (a daemon from the Lima VM project that exposes Apple’s vmnet.framework for rootless virtual networking), cloud-init , and Docker to create…
I’ve been a SRE/PE for a long time, and I’ve always been a bit of a skeptic when it comes to AI. I’ve seen technology hype cycles come and go, and I’ve always believed that there’s no substitute for good old-fashioned coding. Even at Meta, where I worked, the AI agents weren’t always great, which only reinforced my skepticism. I have been told things are better…
Revamping PXE boot stacks seems to be a recurring theme in my career, and my current workplace is no exception. I am part of a tiger team tasked with a significant overhaul of our pxeboot stack on our datacenters, but I am facing a common problem: no access to a dedicated hardware lab for safe testing. We are working on it but in the meantime I could not afford to get stuck. I needed a scalable…
I’ve launched a new article on my blog dedicated to tracking my experience and opinions with working outside of Meta: the purely technical things I love, the things I don’t, and what’s consistently similar across the industry. This is strictly about the tech, not the corporate drama! Follow along and comment there!
Alright: funemployment is done! After a fantastic summer of cycling, delicious food, and quality time with family and friends, I’m excited to share some news: in about one week time I will be starting a new chapter at Crusoe . Leaving Facebook/Meta after 14 years is a significant change for me, but I’m excited by the challenge. I’m especially looking forward to the camaraderie and…
London Edinburgh London (LEL) 2025 proved to be an unforgettable event, though perhaps not for the reasons anyone anticipated. My own journey ended prematurely on the first day, and the entire event was later called off due to severe winds sweeping across northern England and Scotland. If you want to skip directly to the lessons learned , feel free to do so at the bottom. For those unfamiliar, LEL…
This is a report of my successful Celtic Knot brevet. I was a bit nervous going into it for various reasons: My last big brevet was PBP in 2023. In 2024, I didn’t do any 200+ distance audax events, just a 200 each month to work on my RRTY. I think it’s normal for people to take it a bit easier after a PBP season. I got injured in February while riding the East Wicklow 200, with IT band…