Knowing what and when to abstract can be hard to define precisely. Over abstraction has a cost. So does under abstraction. I have seen, writen and refactored terrible examples of both. Anecdotally, flattening an over abstracted hierarchy feels like less work and usually has better test coverage to validate correctness after refactoring than abstracting under abstracted code (spaghetti code, linear code, brand it how you will). Be aware of both extremes and try to find the balance.

My homelab is a 2 node Kubernetes cluster (k3s, raspberry pis), going to scale it up to 4 nodes some day when I want a weekend project.

Built it to learn Kubernetes while studying for CKA/CKD certification for work where I design, implement and maintain service architectures running in Kubernetes/Openshift environments every day. It’s relatively easy for me to manage Kubernetes for my home lab, but It’s a bit heavy and has a steep learning curve if you are new to it which (understandably) puts people off it I think. Especially for homelab/selfhosting use cases. It’s a very valuable (literally $$$) skill if you are in that enterprise space though.

Yeah, I know, that’s a huge advantage in this situation, but not one I can take advantage of 🙂

Switched to qbittorrent+gluetun side car recently and it’s been pretty good compared to the poorly maintained combo torrent+OpenVPN images I was using. Being able to update my torrent client image/config independent from the VPN client is great. Unfortunately most of the docs are Docker focused so it’s a bit of trial and error to get it setup in a non-docker environment like Kubernetes. Here’s my deployment in case it’s useful for anyone. Be careful that you configure qbittirrent to use “tun0” as it’s network interface or you will be exposed (got pinged by AT&T before I realized that one). I’m sure there’s a more robust way to makeuse of gluetun’s DNS over TLS and iptables kill switch that doesn’t require messing with qbittorrent config to secure, but that’s what I have so far and it works well enough for now.

Look for refurbished units, you can get enterprise grade units for like half the retail price. I recently got a refurbished APC from refurbups.com. Comes with brand new batteries, mostly rack mountable stuff. Ended up being a little over half the price of a brand new one with shipping. Can’t tell at a glance if they ship to Canada, but if not I’d be surprised if there wasn’t a similar Canada based site you could find.

Get enough experience and you just have a brief moment of stage 3 as you dive straight to stage 4.

Unless it’s a customer/that-one-guy-at-work (it’s a title, but there’s usually a handful of them) and then there’s this vast stage 0 of back and forth of “are you sure that’s happening, run these commands and paste the entire output to me” to be sure of what they are saying then you jump to stage 3/4.

Never used Inoreader, but recently switched to Newsblur which is open source (app installable via F-Droid) and selfhostable. If you don’t want to self host they have a freemium model to use their hosted service, couldn’t tell you what free vs paid gets you but I haven’t bumped into any limits yet. You can also log in to their site to browse via web browser.

So far the app looks better than other open source readers I’ve tried and thumbnails generally load so the lists are a bit livelier.