My system for managing my notes
How I manage my personal notes for maximum access and minimal data loss
skouf.com
Recent content on skouf.com
Latest posts
Recovering data from a failed drive using ddrescue
My first foray into data recovery has been both educational and, blissfully, not too stressful. You always hear tales of damaged hard drives and complete data loss and think “that’ll never happen to me”. Well, it finally has happened to me, and thankfully the outcome has been pretty good (all things considered), and I’ve learned a bit along the way.
About me
Hey 👋 I’m Nik, a software developer based in Vancouver, Canada. Originally from Melbourne, Australia, I moved to Canada in April of 2024. To get a feel for the work that I do and what I like to write about, the following are some of my favourite blog posts: Beware of transit gateways bearing large packets (on Medium) is an interesting caper involving some of the finer points of AWS Transit…
Skouf.com redesign - part 3
In the final part of my website redesign, I finish things off and simplify by merging my blog with my website, inspired by striving to be simple and other personal sites I’ve come across in the last year or so
A useful OPA snippet for selecting user-created resources
Documenting a neat solution to the problem of enforcing OPA policies against resources, but only when they have been created by a user (as opposed to those created by an internal Kubernetes controller)
Engineering levels
Almost all organisations assign levels to their employees, and engineering is no different. But what are the alternatives to engineering levels, what might we gain by avoiding engineering levels, and how do we get the the more beautiful feature that a level-less work environment offers?
An OPA Gatekeeper gotcha when enforcing policy on all resource kinds
Documenting and providing potential solutions for a beginner OPA Gatekeeper gotcha that I ran into recently
So you want to turn something off?
Retiring software systems is hard work, especially at a big organisation. The longer a system spends out in the world, the more users come to rely on it. But all good things must come to an end, and at some point it will come time to retire your system. This is where the fun begins!
Skouf.com redesign - part 2
In the second part of my website redesign, I think a bit about technology choices and design, and then end up stopping abruptly for a year and half
Skouf.com redesign - part 1
When I was young and naive, I built a website for myself. It’s no-longer fit for purpose, and needs a facelift. This is the first part of a multi-part series, focussing on some of the design considerations of this new skouf.com.
Beware of transit gateways bearing large packets
Investigating an outage caused by AWS Transit Gateways and some quirks of handling TCP.
Enabling graceful node shutdown on EKS in Kubernetes 1.21
Kubernetes 1.21 supports graceful node shutdown, for gracefully terminating pods when a node is shutting down. This post explains how to configure this feature on EKS.
Experiments in mushroom garrum
Recently I’ve been experimenting with a new technique for making incredibly fast garrums. This article documents some of my findings when experimenting with making garrum from mushrooms.
Lacto-fermented red pepper juice
How to make a tangy, delicious, smoky, umami rich ferment from red peppers
Fig leaf syrup and fig leaf lemonade
A unique and versatile syrup, and a refreshing, summery lemonade
IaC in the home - two years on
After two years of running a home Kubernetes setup, I have more thoughts and lessons about how to run a home cluster.
Blog migration
It’s finally time to take my blog off of Medium and host it myself.
Istio TLS policies - ugly bits and undocumented bits
One of the selling points of deploying Istio in your Kubernetes cluster is that it provides mechanisms to enforce authentication between pods communicating with other services within the cluster. The documentation of these leaves a lot to be desired, as we discovered when we first started playing with these features while gearing up to roll out Istio more widely.
Infrastructure as code in the home - one year on
One year on, I revisit my home infrastructure as code setup. I explore what worked, what didn’t and what has changed over the last year.
Infrastructure as code in the home
Infrastructure as Code (herein IaC) is ubiquitous when managing large infrastructure deployments. But when we don’t have hundreds of machines to manage, is IaC still useful?
Log4net rolling file appender with multiple projects
The purpose of this article is to document a minor frustration I ran into at work a few weeks ago, in the hopes that somebody else with the same issue will stumble across it. If I can save another poor soul some time, then it will be well worth writing this.
Monterey K104 restoration
A detailed step-by-step of restoring a keyboard older than I am. Not for the faint-of-keyboard.