Stress-Free School Mornings with Home Assistant
A guide for parents on using Home Assistant to build a dynamic dashboard that gamifies the school morning routine, turning chores into a fun race to unlock a daily fact.
Matthew Hodgkins
Lover of Platform Engineering, SRE, K8s, Golang, Observability and working with nice people. Aussie living in the Netherlands.
Latest posts
Quiet Influence: A Guide to Nemawashi in Engineering
Why "big-reveal" architecture pitches stall—and how Staff+ engineers can apply the Japanese practice of Nemawashi to quietly build consensus and ship transformational change.
Argo Workflows - Proven Patterns from Production
Discover hard-earned insights on leveraging Argo Workflows for infrastructure automation. This guide outlines essential lessons, from managing workflow TTL and pod garbage collection to running synthetic tests with CronWorkflow. Plus, explore advanced patterns to optimize your workflows, including Parameter Output Facade, Semaphore, and Workflow Injection techniques. Arm yourself with these best…
Download a file with PowerShell without specifying its name
How to download a file using PowerShell using the name of the download instead of specifying it yourself.
Creating a VSCode Second Brain
How to setup VSCode to act as a "second brain", or personal knowledge base.
Securing Home Assistant with Cloudflare
A guide to securing your Home Assistant installation with the Cloudflare CDN.
Building a Golden Image Pipeline
A guide to creating a golden image pipeline (base images) for your infrastructure using Packer and Ansible with Windows.
Automating Semantic Versioning for any Project
A guide to automating semantic versioning of any git project (not just NPM!) with the semantic-release tool.
Up your AWS CloudFormation game with Visual Studio Code
How to improve efficiency when working with AWS CloudFormation in Visual Studio Code.
Tackling a Fear Of Public Speaking
8 Tips from trying to tackle my fear of public speaking over the last 18 months.
Splunk Spotlight - Alerts
We take a close look at alerting in Splunk, including sending nice Slack notifications.
Splunk Spotlight - The Lookup Command
We take a close look at the Splunk lookup command, including examples of where you might use it for enriching your logs and using CIDR matching.
Automating Datadog with Terraform
Using Terraform to automate creation of and standardize Datadog monitors
Testing Ansible Roles Against Windows with Test-Kitchen
Using Test-Kitchen with Ansible to apply playbooks to Windows machines and test them with Pester.
Best Practices with Packer and Windows
Some best practices around building Windows based Packer images.
Ultimate PowerShell Prompt Customization and Git Setup Guide
A guide for making your PowerShell prompt pop with ConEmu, Quake mode, a customized and colored prompt and a nice Git setup.
5 Tips for Writing DSC Resources in PowerShell 5
Five useful tips when writing DSC Resources in PowerShell 5. Covers folder structure, IntelliSense, verifying resources, testing using Pester and more.
Windows Metric Dashboards with InfluxDB and Grafana
Using InfluxDB, Telegraf and Grafana to display Windows performance counters on beautiful dashboards.
ChatOps on Windows with Hubot and PowerShell
Using Slack, Hubot and PowerShell to enable ChatOps in the Microsoft Ecosystem.
Setup Windows 10 For Chef and PowerShell DSC Development
The Ultimate Guide to PowerShell String Formatting
When scripting with PowerShell, you will come to a point where you need to work with strings that contain variables. Depending on your situation, there are several methods you can use when formatting strings in PowerShell.
Automating with Jenkins and PowerShell on Windows - Part 2
Learn how to configure Jenkins for PowerShell remoting and automate tasks on remote Windows machines.
Automating with Jenkins and PowerShell on Windows - Part 1
Learn how to use Jenkins to provide a web interface for your PowerShell scripts, making automation accessible to your entire team.
Using PowerShell To Send Metrics To Graphite
Replace a Failed Disk in Windows Server 2012 Storage Spaces
Fix Timeout Error while mounting a LUN in NetApp SnapDrive
Learn how to resolve timeout errors when mounting LUNs in NetApp SnapDrive by properly formatting the disk during the connection process.
How To Run VirtualBox on WHS 2001 - Part 2
How To Run VirtualBox on WHS 2001 - Part 1
The old hodgkins.net.au blog has been re-directed here. The VirtualBox article is out of date, but you can find a screenshot from the old article below.