HN user

chrissoundz

63 karma

(Software / Devops) consultant aka freelancer

trycatchchris.co.uk

Posts2
Comments37
View on HN

If it helps anyone, bom-squad.com is a very similar project and the whole site behind it is on github as well. Full disclosure I contributed to this project myself.

Struggling with this today, and numerous other days. It's so bad. Stop trying to build an operating system out of YAML. I'll always use and recommend Gitlab from now on.

And what the earth is an "actions" anyway? How on earth is simple bash functions not just as suitable here? Instead you have some weird YAML scripting language. It's so bad. Why. Somebody please tell me. I'm losing my mind. It is a good reflection of the rest of the world though and why the worlds infrastructure is crumbling in many places.

Props to those of you still at the mercy of your OS publishers (Windows, Ubuntu, Mac) who dictate your software, updates, how your hardware is used and general freedom. Did a lot of that in my teens.

I boot my pc, login, press win+p, type in "fir" which autocompletes to firefox and it starts firefox. And I don't think this process will change much for the rest of my life.

The alternative is a constantly changing menu UI, intrusive popups/notifications, deprecations, and a "oh wait sorry Firefox now has to be Certified from the app store", random telemetry data being sent over, strange unknown but necessary "computation" happening and what else have I missed?

Moderation strike 3 years ago

It's data is licensed under creative commons, and last I looked into it, you could easily download the entire stackoverflow dump. There was a torrent and it was about 50GB or something.

"Kubernetes manifests are an unnecessarily detailed abstraction for most software developers. Developers don't need as much control. Therefore, they need higher-level abstractions, which hide more detail."

Agreed... Though I think there is a different solution. Instead of coming up with all these hardcoded formats and standards (docker-compose, k8s, etc, helm, ansible) which essentially are just 'functions' that map X to Y.

Instead of defining 'docker-compose' files, just define the containers itself. And if required, map that to a docker-compose, or k8s manifest or whatever. Remove all these unnecessary layers that aren't really that helpful - because each standard or implementation has it's own parser, error handling etc - why bother with all this?

And just use something like Nix for this. Or just define it as a common python value. Otherwise we end up building all sorts of templating and ugly programming-in-yaml. You could take a look at https://docs.hercules-ci.com/arion/#_arion_compose_nix to see what this might look like - uses Nix to do something like docker-compose.

Where does it say you shouldn't use nix-env, niv or shell.nix in 2023? I would argue that there is extensive documentation and functionality for that already and it's not like it's getting deprecated. I've used Nix/Nixos for the past 4 years and still haven't looked into flakes - all the Nix stuff I use works great so I just can't really be bothered to spend time learning more, though I don't doubt it has some advantages.

This sounds exactly like what is happening with Axie Infinity right now. Where you need to buy in with about $500 of ethereum right now... And then get "paid" out actual rewards and supposedly can make your money back after a month or something grinding in the game.

I think there was a lot of potential to be made in the service/support aspect of containerization of applications - configuring appropriate dependencies etc. Now probably not so much - most people have probably painstakingly learnt the knowledge by now. Maybe even some kind of container marketplace.

Otherwise, I don't think it's practical to have docker itself as a commercial product.

It's not just the configuration format. There is a whole 'Kubernetes runtime' (what they call the 'control loops' aka 'controllers') that runs 24/7 watching the configuration live and making appropriate changes.

Unlike Ansible (and I suspect the others) where it's really only more of a 'run once' type of thing... And sometimes if you try running it a second time it won't even succeed.

I really enjoy seeing new ideas around interfaces. But I do wonder, rather than creating a new shell, couldn't we have a 'json/structured' mode for cli programs - and maintain compatibility with existing shells? For example if it was toggled with a SHELL_FORMAT environment variable?

What issues could be faced with this approach?

I'm someone who kind of skipped the whole sysadmin thing and went straight to 'devops'. I think it's exactly the same thing - just with containers, docker, Kubernetes, build pipelines and so forth.

A better name might just be modern-sysadmin or sysadmin v2.

You mentioned writing a tutorial and being able to execute the result, so thought I'd mention a project I'm working on to do exactly this.

It started when I got annoyed with how difficult it was to write a 'code' tutorial.

Essentially it allows you commit a markdown file (or any other format) alongside your source code and you can embed source code snippets / shell commands into this file - which then gets rendered into the main 'output' (the tutorial / article).

https://github.com/chrissound/GitChapter

SEEKING WORK - Remote / UK / South Africa

Predominantly backend web developer / Linux sysadmin with 5 years of experience. Reliable systems, innovative solutions and value creation is what I'm all about! Freelancing for nearly a year - room to accommodate new long term prospects!

Languages / Tech: PHP, Bash, Haskell ,AWS, GCP, Docker, Kubernetes, Linux

Github: https://github.com/chrissound Website: https://trycatchchris.co.uk Email: In my profile