What programming/technical projects have you been working on?

I actually just finished my portfolio. I have been in a bit of a rut, project-wise (Turns out, I hate Rails). It's a terminal-based portfolio (with some Fallout inspiration). You can check it out here if you want.

Currently phasing out our docker swarm cluster for kubernetes. Right now we're moving our development deployments to kubernetes to test things out for now.

So far, the changes are holding. Code commits spool up drone, a secondary pipeline stage kicks off to update the manifest with the updated image tag thanks to kustomize, argocd picks up the change and a new replicaset gets created.

I will need to look into a way to template our manifests so I can more easily generate them for our deployments because copy/pasting and making slight adjustments to a dozen or so files is error prone.

Built up a simple data engineering platform with Airflow in kubernetes (GKE), and imported all our ragtag bunch of BigQuery datasets under Terraform. Surprisingly straightforward to setup even if you have Airflow set at "planetscale" mode (with celery, KEDA for autoscaling worker pods, on a GKE cluster with autoscaling nodes).

Got it syncing with a git repo and task logs on a bucket so the deployment is essentially stateless. Managed to get Google SSO working with a bit of Python code, then Airflow essentially says "good luck" and makes you write the authorization code if you're not using a provider that has group data in the claim so you can easily map it (like GitHub). Will need to pull some of our more full-time devs to cook up something resembling saner RBAC. We're not in Active Directory land anymore.

We can now migrate an obscenely complex hierarchy of Jenkins jobs triggering more jobs and a hodgepodge of scripts on a crontab spread across VMs nobody has logged to in years that apparently performed some essential business function. One step closer to retiring our crumbling Jenkins instance that became a defacto workload scheduler that reminds me of Autosys.

Still working on revamping how values are built in repeatTest, the property test library I’m working on. I have pipelines working, including caching of intermediate values that didn’t change. Writing a simple function to generate a random value is more convenient, so it’s difficult to see any value in this so far. But hopefully it will result in faster shrinking for large values eventually.

Next, I want to add support for dependencies on multiple incoming values so that it’s possible to have a build tree instead of a build pipeline.

I made a little word splitting program while on my phone between rides at Hong Kong Disneyland: https://github.com/chapmanjacobd/computer/blob/main/bin/find_word_breaks.py

echo -n mylifeboatisfullofeels | find_word_breaks.py
my lifeboat is full of eels
echo -n myothercarisacdr | find_word_breaks.py
my other car is a c dr

It's far from perfect but it made the waiting-in-line go by fast.

Something dynamic programming like this probably runs faster: https://github.com/christophsk/segment-string/

I am currently working on my website.

I am using Astro to generate it and it’s been good so far. I am making all the blog features “from scratch” as much as possible and it’s quite a cool exercise.

On the other hand, I am also playing with Portainer to try out a lot of open-source solutions to minimize my dependency on other companies when possible.

Professionally I'm in the final stages of launching a webapp for my client. It's a very niche thing, automating tasks for notaries, so lots of domain-specific and country/state specific logic there. It felt kind of nice and old-school working on this, away from the inflated AI bubble.
This app was a neat chance for me to figure out Next.js app router. After a year of working with it on this project, I can definitely say it's an improvement. Sometimes I do get a headache figuring out the optimal path our data and re-renders take through all the layers of caches, SSR, layouts, context, zustand store and plain old react shenanigans. But there's always an elegant solution hidden in there if you poke at it long enough, and I do like chasing that feeling.

On the non-professional site, my attention is split between figuring out how to debug network connectivity issues in the docker containers of my media server stack. I'm using yams by tildes suggestion, and so far it's been working great, but during some regular updates something went horribly wrong. I think it's related to wireguard, but can't figure out why networking works fine on the host machine, but DNS doesn't resolve on any of the containers. I'm not knowledgeable enough about these things, but I guess it's a chance to brush up on the full networking stack.

My second project is a little Arduino LED side quest. My partner has an art expo soon, and they need an LED setup in a box that drives a physical game. Basically, different parts of the led string need to light up in different colours, on different timers. The last 1/3th of the strip I'm repurposing as a sort of timer/progress bar. Even with my very basic knowledge of electronics, it's surprising how quickly I could get started on this. I did fry the first two LEDs on my strip before discovering it does actually matter which side of the capacitor you connect to what in the circuit, but oh well. LED seems very forgiving of beginner mistakes.

this barely counts. Anyway, boringavatars.com decided to monetize and the rates are insane for something I use a few times a year. Long story short, I asked chatGPT to make something similar and also another pattern. this is the output --- and I am over the moon with the results. Instead of having to capture svg etc, I can just right click and download. ezpz

The colors default to Dracula, but I can also use ?colors=ff5555,a2a4455... in the URL to set the scheme. The images are all 1024x1024 right now.

edit: added some more patterns -- https://i.imgur.com/7t7m3V0.png

I am doing a talk at a local meetup at the end of the month about Deployments and how I have used Dokku to deploy simple applications on my own VPS. The idea sprung from the fact that I work with a lot of developers who don't understand what it means to actually deploy a web application and how my own history of web development has positioned me right in the middle of Dev and Ops (DevOps!).

So the simple web app I have created is a Chat application using Bun, Hono, and Mithril.js.