New post: Why a Two-Node Docker Swarm w/ ZFS Snapshots Is Enough This isn't about defending Swarm, it's about designing systems with clear failure modes and using storage that doesn't pretend to scale magically #homelab This makes 12 posts in 12 months. 2025 goal met amf3.github.io/articles/arc...

Neat, a SSO (single sign-on) middleware that supports OpenID on the frontend and simple HTTP auth with backend apps. This might be what I need for self-hosted services at home. 😀 www.authelia.com

This is fun and shows which topics I discussed throughout the year. My most-used words in 2025 were: 1. "docker" (12×) 2. "plugin" (11×) 3. "cloudinit" (11×) 4. "router" (8×) 5. "qemu" (8×) See which words you used the most here: anisota.net/harvest

Will I ever settle on a storage format when writing this app? So far its been SQLite -> Parquet -> NDJSON. I find the JSON part boring. No compression and is it any better than CSV when not using nested fields? Now I'm tempted to try Protobuf to get the compression that I likely don't need.

I use git submodules to pin the Papermod theme version used by my blog. Tonight I realized I can pin the Hugo web framework by using go modules. The pinned Hugo version is ran with "go tool Hugo". One of those things that became obvious to me once it was obvious. Now for some CI pipeline updates 😐

Nice summary of past AWS re:Invent videos on how S3 works behind the scenes. bigdata.2minutestreaming.com/p/how-aws-s3...

Do you ever have those moments of running across a fun article, only to realize it was posted on hacker news two months ago? Me, this morning. 🤦‍♂️ bogdanthegeek.github.io/blog/project...

I tasted the forbidden fruit. Running my home router inside a VM. It's delicious. #Mikrotik CHR, #QEMU, PCI passthrough, qcow2 snapshots, full reproducibility. Easy rollback. Manage networks like software projects. Here's how I built it: amf3.github.io/articles/vir...

Is it really only two people who are behind distributing PCI tuples which identify PCI devices on #Linux? Values are distributed in the pci.ids file, used by the kernel and apps like lspci. pci-ids.ucw.cz How does one even land that kind of gig? Yet another moment where my brain says 🤯.

TIL Go quietly fixed sharing behavior with for loop variables being used by goroutines. Previous to Go 1.22 each goroutine reused the same loop variable. Now each iteration gets its own copy. No more i=5 five times. 🤭 This explains why one might find i := i in older code, a work around. #golang

In the spirit of writing more, here's a post on how I build Go CLIs with urfave/cli, how it keeps help and actions coupled with options, and why I'll use it with future projects. amf3.github.io/articles/cod... #golang #cli

Speaking of GC, there's a thread on r/golang that discusses the new experimental Green Tea GC in Go 1.25. Testing shows its not better but it's not worse. www.dolthub.com/blog/2025-09...

What happens when @birdsoftheworld.bsky.social combines machine learning with a phone? You get a bird ID app that uses bird calls to ID birds. Think Pokémon Go but with real animals. merlin.allaboutbirds.org

With a QEMU article stalled at 80% complete and a tiny utility project waiting to be published to github, I should probably pay attention to this advice.

Interesting. QEMU 10.1 supports WASM and can run inside a browser. 🤔 wiki.qemu.org/ChangeLog/10.1

I’m feeling out of the loop. I started with MD5 checksums to find duplicate files in local storage. Then I read modern CPUs have instruction sets for SHA256. Oh but there's also xxhash which is even faster at checksums.😕 #golang output shows md5 is 3x slower than sha256 and 5x slower than xxhash

I like this #golang comparison of different SQLite drivers. They include test environment specifics, which allows me to replicate the findings. github.com/cvilsmeier/g... Without specifics I wonder if the results are valid. Something to keep in mind for the next Product A is better than B post.

SlateDB Go bindings! github.com/slatedb/slat...

I like this post explaining how file systems can be implemented with a key value store. blog.vmsplice.net/2024/01/key-...

I’ve been quiet lately while looking into a bufferbloat issue with my home internet. Bufferbloat is latency caused when a router buffers too many packets and can impact games and video calls.

Something on my TODO list is writing up how to automate Jenkins deployments. It’s essentially a two step deployment. 1) The “configuration as code” plugin installs plugins and manages users. 2) The “Pipelines as code” plugin manages projects. Okay, okay, I’ll move it to the next sprint.

I just launched Tarchive, a simple, tar-based HTTP object store. Think of it as a personal object store that uses append-only .tar archives called “pails.” It’s fast, inspectable, and scriptable. Great for devs, homelabbers, and archivists. GitHub: github.com/amf3/tarchive #Go #OpenAPI #homelab

Hey look at that. I complain about something and it gets fixed. 😀 The latest release of oapi-codegen announced a new feature for dealing with optional pointers. #OpenAPI #golang github.com/oapi-codegen...

Docker Offload is an interesting pivot. My guess is they are using predefined contexts in Docker desktop to redirect to their cloud services. This seems like something which could be done locally. Now to find that Nvidia GTX1060 I have in my spare parts bin for running OpenLLaMA. 🙂

Generics in Go finally clicked. 🎉 Examples felt abstract. Until generics saved me from writing a bunch of boilerplate in my unit tests. Read about it here: amf3.github.io/articles/cod... #golang #generics #testing

My new sprinkler controller is finally online. It's #esp32 based and ESPHome is doing the heavy lifting. I stuck a DHT22 temp sensor on it because why not. #esphome even has a /metrics endpoint so I can graph relay state and sensor temp via Prometheus.

OpenAPI is so easy right? Until it generates Go structs full of pointers. 😞 I wrote up what worked and what didn’t. “OpenAPI in Practice: Go Server + Python Client from Spec” amf3.github.io/articles/api... #OpenAPI #Golang #Python

🚢 New post - DIY Docker Volume Drivers: What’s Missing What’s missing in the plugin ecosystem and how I built a simple Go plugin without root, FUSE, or cloud lock-in. amf3.github.io/articles/sto... #Docker #GoLang #DevOps #Homelab

I’m starting to get why Docker plugin development slowed down. * write the plugin * create a image containing the plugin * create a throw away container using the image * extract the rootfs from the container with “docker export” into a directory named rootfs * finally run “docker plugin create”

I was curious how snappy compared to lz4 and wrote a go program to find out. Snappy seems to be a bit better with both compressed data output and resource usage. Input is the first 1,000,000 numbers of pi.

I was looking at Mulitpass docs and noticed this deprecation banner. While it makes sense to simplify overlapping product features, I'd like to think someone from Canonical read my cloud-init series. 😀

This is exciting. I just noticed an issue in Moby that has a linked prototype for supporting CSI plugins in regular Docker (not swarm). I hope it gets approved. github.com/moby/moby/is...

What if a tar archive could behave like an append-only object store that supports versioning of objects? I demonstrate how it's possible in my latest post. amf3.github.io/articles/sto...

Why yes, I do use Jenkins to water my blueberry plants. Don't you? 😀 I'm replacing a Particle Photon with a ESP32 and esphome.io. A few blocks of YAML results in a web server that toggles sprinkler relays on or off. I never thought I would buy into the phrase 'YAML programer' but now I do. 🤯

I've been practicing my soldering skills today. This is a q-tip for scale. I'm still suspicious of the left part but it will remind me to not mix power cables from different modular PSUs. 12v & 5v got applied to the 5v & 3v lines on a 10 TB SATA drive.

How many packets would a woodchuck NAT if a woodchuck could NAT packets? 🐿️ Apparently ... at least three. Triple NAT, QEMU on macOS, unified logging, Wireshark, all here: amf3.github.io/articles/vir...

I discovered qemu has support for the vmnet framework in MacOS. This allows two VMs to connect to each other. www.qemu.org/docs/master/... In my case, one vm is running Alpine & the other is a Mikrotik router image. Now I can test network changes without getting yelled at by the family. 😀

I just published my notes on tips & tricks for managing QEMU storage images. Useful for manipulating cloud images before deployment. From snapshots to raw conversions, it’s all here. amf3.github.io/articles/vir...

My thoughts on going back to IRC channels after years of using slack? To quote my dog, it's ruff! 🐾

Looking for helpful hints on troubleshooting cloud-init provisioning issues? You can read about them in my latest post. amf3.github.io/articles/clo...

I think it was a not very well guarded secret… but LinkedIn’s stream team will finally talk publicly about their Kafka rewrite, many years in the making, called North Guard, as well as their abstraction on top of Kafka + NG, called Xinfra. Sign up here to hear about it: meetu.ps/e/NWkXx/466N...

I tried out Flox and like its ability for managing build dependencies. It's conceptually like RVM for Ruby but language agnostic. Check it out: flox.dev

I just posted my second article on automating Ubuntu installs with autoinstall & cloud-init. Learn how to provision bare-metal instances locally with minimal effort. Read it here: amf3.github.io/articles/clo...

I just posted a "getting started with cloud-init" guide on using cloud-init with Multipass. This setup will quickly provision VMs on your local machine, making it easy to test and iterate on cloud-init configs before deploying to real hosts. amf3.github.io/articles/clo...

What happens when using llama3 to check sentence structure. > The first sentence feels like a non-sequitur. Ouch 😃

The differences in dependency requirements between cloud-init (Canonical) & tiny-cloud (Alpine Linux) are interesting. Both rely on external utils for disk partitioning, which is fine. The tiny-cloud approach uses shell where cloud-init needs a python runtime.

This is a neat trick. Cloudflare, OpenDNS & Google DNS offer a TXT record that returns your public IP. theboreddev.com/how-to-obtai...

It's nice to see that Incus, the open source fork of LXD, is being mentioned by TrueNAS. www.truenas.com/blog/truenas...

It's interesting to see new companies having to learn on premise practices. blog.railway.com/p/data-cente...

Aww cloud-init you little rascal you. It keeps creating the LVM volume on the swap partition instead of where it belongs. 🙁