Rained every day this week! Novel! Shame it couldn’t do that in the summer and the allotment would have produced more.

DIY

I got the new kitchen door cut to length this morning, put it in place, lifted it up with the tiny air bags, and got the hinge positions marked. Tomorrow I’ll break out my Dewalt router and get the hinge recesses cut, get the hinges on, and get it put up. I’ll get the handle on later in the week.

Work

I made great progress this week and finished 3 Jira tasks:

• Finished implementing a VPC resize for our “version 2” architecture. This involved destroying and recreating a lot of infrastructure. Like most other places that wisely don’t use a monolithic Terraform setup, this involved a lot of manual terraform destroys via code. But it went pretty smoothly in the end. This resize will never happen on existing customers so the hard part is done.

• In our “version 2” EKS cluster, we were hoping to be able to run it fully on Graviton instances and use ARM64 containers. However, we found that some of our dependencies - looking at you Dynatrace - don’t support ARM64 for ALL their tooling even though it’s 2025… So we chose to decide to switch our small, static node group (for critical pods) back to x86_64. I tested the code against various v1 environments before applying it to v2, and it went smoothly.

• Once the X86_64 node group was in place, I was able to complete the install of the Dynatrace Synthetic Checks tooling. Found it was missing a particular secret, but a quick bit of Terraform code to get that into AWS Secrets Manager, a further External Secret to get it into Kubernetes, and then it was all done.

Personal Projects

Trying - to build my own OCI compliant Registry

In every bank I have ever worked at, they ran their own private Docker image registry. And in every bank, it was Harbor - which is an awesome thing to look at. Yet, I always found it curious why no one wanted to use it anywhere else I went.

Now I know why. Powerful? Yes. But, it’s also so overly opinionated and complex that’s it’s a nightmare to run. You have to install it in a very specific way, there’s no flexibility. It requires you to run annoying scripts to generate config. It really wants you to use the ports it wants to use - anything else you have installed already be damned. I couldn’t let it do that so I tried to install it behind my Nginx reverse proxy and eventually got it working. But then I found it would silently fail when trying to use it from a Github Action - and yet work from my local environment. I could never figure out why. of work.

So, Nope! Uninstalled!. I fell back to what everyone ends up doing - using Github Container Registry and AWS ECR.

The Liminal Radio Project

My open sourced Liminal Radio project is coming along nicely. I have:

• 12 stations that it can tune into now. The 4 new ones are:
  • Kiosk Radio - Brussels, Belgium
  • Radio Caroline - United Kingdom
  • KBOO FM - Portland, Oregon, USA
  • CTUK - Montreal, Canada

All that have meta-data can show it in the player, including long format descriptions, and even the occasional album art. I also rejigged all the SEO stuff on the page so it looks a lot better when shared on social media.

Dev.to

I created an account on Dev.to and the plan is to write a tech article there at least once every 2 weeks for grins. More if I find interesting things to write about.

And finally - TDN

As the webmaster of The Druid Network, I’ve been stuck for some time with our out-of-date members-only social engine running and ancient copy of ELGG. Because it’s so old it requires an old version of PHP and frankly, it’s getting unsafe.

Therefore my plan over this autumn, and probably winter, is to:

1. Duplicate the site into a docker powered test bed.
2. Upgrade its ELGG slowly, version by version, until it’s on the latest.
3. Try my best to not lose any data, but not to worry about our customisations.
4. Upgrade its PHP as needed on any major version.
5. Once it’s all working at the latest version, try to reapply our customisations.
6. Somehow figure out how to re-migrate the data from the old site to the new one - which will have moved on a lot since I started this process.
7. Switch the site over and profit.

That’s My Week

As always, you can add my RSS feed to your reader of choice and if you made it this far thanks for reading!