Blogs

I have been using recently Anthropic’s (Claude) Fable and Opus at work, and OpenAI’s GPT for hobby projects. This is not about that, though, but instead about how my use of the Internet search engines has evolved over time. I hear there are number of people who use only chatbots for searching the internet these days. While it is actually very tempting (one chat window, all your questions answered), in practice it does not work out too well. ...

I have been taking digital photos since 2000 - initially on Canon PowerShot S10 pocket camera, later various larger DSLRs, and (mostly) nowadays also using camera phones. The software to deal with the pictures has never been that great though. Ancient history (2000-2005) I vaguely remember that in 2000-2005 I mostly dumped the .jpg files to various places. It is a wonder that I never managed to lose any significant photos that I cared about, as at the time I was not particularly meticulous about backups. ...

I have been doing software development for decades. Yet I have been never as optimistic about the future of my chosen career as I am now. I am starting this just from point of view of programming languages, for reasons I describe later.. My somewhat ‘played with or used for stuff’ programming language list is at 32 languages at the moment, but I am just covering about main ones to convey a point. ...

I have been quite keen about AWS S3 professionally from about ever since it debuted. And that is long time ago (2006). This post is more about my S3 at home exercise, which is not even two years old. Why S3? I’m not going to detail about that here (the at home part is the point of this blog post), but S3 has offered for two decades now pretty cool object storage. Here are some key aspects of AWS S3: ...

I started using it in late 2023, and never paid anything for it, so I definitely should not complain. Two and half years of mostly loyal service, but sometimes less is more, and I am moving on. Background Oracle Cloud offers very generous free tier. You could basically get (if you jump through some hoops to fight for sparse capacity) 8 VCPU/24GB RAM/200GB ARM machine, or consistently 2 VCPUs of X86 with also 200GB storage. ...

My home infrastructure observability stack has been relatively static (for some definition of static) for awhile. VictoriaMetrics + Loki has been ‘fine’. But I like dabbling with other alternatives, and this time it is Greptime. Greptime - what is it? https://greptime.com is basically unified storage of all observability data. I’m not trying to market it too hard here, but basically: It is Rust It handles storage in various ways local ( using Parquet format ) object storage ( no idea, not tried yet ) … It allows clients to use various APIs (this list is not exhaustive, just ones I find interesting) Prometheus Vector has built-in sinks for it pg, mysql it also has built-in GUI Integration with my infra Vector before Greptime I run Vector at home. Hard. Here’s the vector graph before Greptime: ...

I have been using pyinfra for various things at home (and work) for a while now (since December 2021). There has been 700+ commits in the repository called ‘pyinfra’, and all of them are actually done by hand (old-fashioned, I know). Oddly enough, this is the only repository (besides my Obsidian vaults) that I have both been actively using this year AND is so far completely LLM free. ...

Background I have been working on number of vibe coded apps recently after I gave up on my most recent startup, and before starting to work somewhere elsewhere. So I have done lots of projects I have never had the time for before. HomeNetFlow Lixie’s first iteration that I wrote by hand in 2024 ( see Observability at home ) was and is still useful. It is still only about categorizing log lines, by hand, and then having those rules applied to logs at scale using vector. My home infrastructure uses rules generated by it still, and I look at the logs quite often (that are filtered based on those rules). ...

It has been long time in the making, but I finally transitioned my journaling (and also blogging) to Obsidian from Bear. Year ago I seemed relatively content with Bear, but not apparently any more. Why? I have looked (somewhat enviously) at the Obsidian users in the past. It has lots to go for: A lot of plugins ( some unmaintained messes, admittedly ) with plenty of extra value Mobile app ( no need for my custom Apple Notes integration ) Markdown as a native format (making it more convenient for use with e.g. Emacs, or AI tooling) Why not before? I am very much anti-subscription for tools I actively use. Before 2025 Obsidian did not allow ‘commercial use’ without subscription. I also started using Bear in 2019 or so. I am reluctant to change what works, and so far it has worked quite well for me. ...

I have been ‘enjoying’ some awkward moments with default sandboxing of Codex CLI, Claude Code, and (lack of it in) OpenCode. I settled on a single sandboxing solution, and it is nono - Next-Generation Agent Security. The problem All coding agents use current shell environment to launch the tools they use. Those with sandboxing have rules which are set up to prevent ‘invalid’ use, but in practice they break often and are painful (or not possible) to configure properly per tool. ...