Every week, my tech infrastructure gets better.
At the same time, I continue to expand the infrastructure of other oganizations to whom I belong. Their systems are absolutely beautiful. They don't have the 5+ years of tech debt. They just jumped right in and did it right the first time.
The cleanup of my own environment is a thankless job. Hundreds of hours of work and no new features. But, it's made me much faster at gettting reproducable setups going quickly.
For example, I set up a GitLab instance from scratch in a day. That includes backups, off-site backups, creating groups, migrating repos, issue trackers... everything. And the Ansible role I found and used didn't work properly out of the box. I submitted a PR for those fixes, and multiple additional features (e.g. proper TLS with GutLab's LetsEncrypt integration).
All that in one day.
I've learned to not wait for the upstream repo to accept my changes. I just fork it and use my own copy. They can accept it or be left behind. Either way, it doesn't stop me. And if I become the new maintainer, so be it.
By the end of the year, I expect all but a handful of my servers to be easily redeployable. No data loss, minimal downtime. The exceptions will be the ones with massive amounts of data or risk: PKI server, file server, Matrix server, database server, etc. But I'll likely get to those as well, eventually.
Dr. Hax
npub16v…meqha
2026-06-25 23:03:27 UTC
Author Public Key
npub16v82nr4xt62nlydtj0mtxr49r6enc5r0sl2f7cq2zwdw7q92j5gs8meqhaSeen on
wss://nos.lolPublished at
2026-06-25 23:03:27 UTCEvent JSON
{
"id": "0c89d17c165ff627dbd9ca87deb7a7bf871c9f0ad4c29351a8062ca81b9f87a5",
"pubkey": "d30ea98ea65e953f91ab93f6b30ea51eb33c506f87d49f600a139aef00aa9511",
"created_at": 1782428607,
"kind": 1,
"tags": [
[
"alt",
"A short note: Every week, my tech infrastructure gets better. \n\n..."
]
],
"content": "Every week, my tech infrastructure gets better. \n\nAt the same time, I continue to expand the infrastructure of other oganizations to whom I belong. Their systems are absolutely beautiful. They don't have the 5+ years of tech debt. They just jumped right in and did it right the first time.\n\nThe cleanup of my own environment is a thankless job. Hundreds of hours of work and no new features. But, it's made me much faster at gettting reproducable setups going quickly.\n\nFor example, I set up a GitLab instance from scratch in a day. That includes backups, off-site backups, creating groups, migrating repos, issue trackers... everything. And the Ansible role I found and used didn't work properly out of the box. I submitted a PR for those fixes, and multiple additional features (e.g. proper TLS with GutLab's LetsEncrypt integration).\n\nAll that in one day.\n\nI've learned to not wait for the upstream repo to accept my changes. I just fork it and use my own copy. They can accept it or be left behind. Either way, it doesn't stop me. And if I become the new maintainer, so be it.\n\nBy the end of the year, I expect all but a handful of my servers to be easily redeployable. No data loss, minimal downtime. The exceptions will be the ones with massive amounts of data or risk: PKI server, file server, Matrix server, database server, etc. But I'll likely get to those as well, eventually.",
"sig": "41f1baed53af8af02b09d6fec444a871d912817262c39ba59a01cd207b4d2a12639cdfe44decf417003ed7468dcfa4423fb27cc2031dec6f8b2945f62a86c3dd"
}