Some time ago I installed k3s on a couple of Raspberry Pi to learn more about Kubernetes. I ended up using this cluster as a home lab. I would use it to test some software I wrote, to try out tools or services that could be deployed on Kubernetes, and I used it to control my home network too. I deployed PiHole to this cluster and configured my router to use PiHole as the DNS server. It worked pretty well for a while until the Pi became noisy because their fans started to fail.

One of my goals for this year was to write 3 blog posts. This is my third post. One could argue that a year in review kind of content is cheating, just something to beat the goal I set; or that I’m following the trend, after all everyone and everything is doing a 2023 retrospective now. And I could agree with that. It is partly true. But it is also true that I’ve done it anyway, in my own mind, remembering the nice things that happened and the things I set out to do but didn’t. And I think it’s a good thing to remember your year. Just like we do at the end of our Scrum Sprints: think about what went well and you want to do more of, but also what was not good so that you can improve on the bad things.

I recently started using AWS CDK in a project that I’m now contributing to at work. It is a new experience for me, this tool. I’ve turned a blind eye to it for some time as a result of bad experiences in the past. Not with AWS CDK itself, mind you, but with the concept.

The basic premise of AWS CDK is that you can use the power of a programming language to describe your infrastructure.

I had a teacher tell me once, back when I was in technical school, that my first program, when learning a new programming language, should always be a “Hello, World!”. She told me that otherwise I would be cursed and would never learn the new language.

I don’t consider myself a superstitious person, but almost 15 years have passed and I continue following her caution — although, as you may have noticed, the exclamation mark is no longer there; I find its enthusiasm a little too much now. But the “Hello World” still remains, even as the first entry in a blog. How else could I start?