A long time ago I worked at a company that had a wide use and deployment of Apache Cassandra . For those of you unfamiliar Cassandra is a very unique database thats widely used amongst most of your favorite massive-scale websites. Apple is regularly quoted as a major user having over 100PB's of data sitting around in thousands of clusters, but its relatively ubiquitous in the industry. What is…
Saint is a project I built last year that was designed to replace grafana for all of my use cases. In this post I'd like to talk about what it is, how it works, why I built it, and whats next. Why Not Grafana? Historically I've used mostly ClickHouse for aggregating and storing observability data, which when combined with Grafana can provide a powerful tool for monitoring and alerting. Despite…
I thought it'd be interesting to document the current state of my personal infrastructure which is used both for my own play and work needs. While it'd be fair to call most of this a homelab I actually have a few servers within a proper datacenter so "personal infrastructure" is perhaps a bit more apt (and a more fun title). Since everything is split between two "sites" we'll talk about them…
I decided to take a break from posting (and coding) for a while, both to celebrate some of the holiday/new-year season but also just matching my natural work schedule over the year. But of course despite the break period the work must continue and the past few months have a few fun things to report back on. Project: saint January produced a few changes for saint that can mostly be categorized as…
I recently read a news post from the tor project and a related blog post from Pierre Bourdon which reminded me of an interesting anecdote from my experiences at Discord. Both talk about the issue of SYN spoofing on the modern internet, which can often be used as a social engineering attack to get cheap hosts to null-route or otherwise block customer services. While it's not a widely known or…
Backups are a core component of any infrastructure, including your own. In this post I'm going to detail how I have backups configured for my personal infrastructure. Much of this post will include snippets from a closed-source configuration management tool I built called confck but the broad concepts and configuration should apply broadly. This setup handles my relatively small 2-3Tb of data…
I've always wanted to do some sort of "what I'm working on" or personal changelog esq post, so I'm gonna split the difference and try something new. jorb jorb is a small Go library that implements a basic job queue on top of Postgres. Internally I use this for a few web services that need background job scheduling, and it was built with 10+ years of dealing with redis/rabbitmq bullshit in mind.…
This month was quite productive as I split my time across numerous projects. Most of these projects I've gone into more detail explaining in the october recap . maf maf is an old project I built for a client that is basically a lighter version of buildyboi which was a CI/CD project I built years ago. When I passed off this tool to the client I stopped being responsible for updates (although like…
I was recently reminded of a simple and concise statement from a friend, "It's Going to Be Ok." At the time, I was going through a particularly rough emotional period in my life, a time I'd probably still today qualify as the "worst" part of my life. I remember this comment well because of the immense relief it brought me and how independent that was from the compassion it was shared with. The…
I build a lot of small web servers in Go that often need to embed static assets, usually HTML/CSS/JavaScript files. Luckily since Go 1.16 we've had the embed package as a simple and powerful tool for embedding whatever data we need into our resulting Go binaries. This functionality combined with Go's static-first approach to compilation means its trivial to build binaries that Just Work (tm)…