What are you doing this week?
13 points by caius
13 points by caius
What are you doing this week? Feel free to share!
Keep in mind it’s OK to do nothing at all, too.
After being unemployed for nine months, I'm finally starting a new job today! So, this week is going to be the usual whirlwind figuring out all the new things.
I'm also playing around with meshtastic, trying to see if there are any useful things i can do with it given current events.
Job hunting.
I've been very fortunate to never have been unemployed before and there is a big gulf between seeing it from the outside and experiencing it from the inside. I've had a lot of support getting my resume out, but I'm not seeing any results yet. If you need someone with systems programming or performance optimization experience, feel free to reach out.
https://keenwrite.com/blog/2025/10/15/creating-catchy-cover-letters/
I sent out 70+ applications over a 3-month period before landing a job. A number of people commented that my application stood out. The code on my blog post reduced the amount of time to generate custom cover letters that matched the company's branding from about 20 minutes down to 5, which saved me 19 hours give or take.
Systems programmer you say? Contact me or my support team: guide.handmadecities.com/docs/support/employment. Our community does referrals which get you straight to a hiring manager.
It might also help to join our Revolt server ASAP, as we've recently posted multiple opportunities for January.
At work: I'll be writing a post-mortem describing the P1 outage we had last week and I'll be creating some new network usage alerts.
At home: I am going to try and start Effective C and see how that goes. Also do some more eBPF exercises.
TL;DR: playing with my new MikroTik home router setup. This will take some time, since MikroTik RouterOS is new to me, and I’m taking some time off this week to focus on it and document the process on my blog.
A longer story.
A couple of months ago I bought an old ThinkPad X200 and, mostly for fun (and maybe a bit of profit), decided to install FreeBSD on it. I hadn’t really used FreeBSD in about 15 years, although in my early days as a sysadmin it was my primary operating system and where I first learned the UNIX world.
Coming back to FreeBSD felt very natural. It still had the same philosophy I remembered, but with a much more modern and polished system around it - especially ZFS. That mix of familiarity and long-term stability eventually pushed me to build a small FreeBSD-based home NAS.
So I picked up a used ThinkCentre, installed two 4 TB SSDs, set up ZFS, NFS, and Samba, and then configured backups from my laptops. It was simple, clean, and very satisfying.
At some point I looked at that ThinkCentre standing alone on a windowsill and realized it deserved a more permanent place. That naturally led to getting a small server rack, and once I had a rack, it felt reasonable to put the network gear there as well.
That was the moment I decided to finally try MikroTik and clean up my long-standing router zoo. I ended up buying two MikroTik devices: an RB4011iGS as the main router and an hAP ax3 dedicated to Wi-Fi.
Now I have a small but fairly complete home lab, I’m learning MikroTik RouterOS in more depth, and preparing a new series of posts on my blog about routing, VPNs, storage, and backups.
For context, here are two photos of the small home lab rack this evolved into:
holy cow, that's some setup for "home lab"
I used mikrotik before but never got to any extra configs, atm I settled with openwrt and a couple of chinese routers. Thinking about getting a ThinkCenter for backups too, def not RB4011iGS
Yeah, it definitely escalated more than I initially planned 🙂 I was actually aiming for something small and quiet, but once the NAS and the rack were there, the router upgrade felt inevitable.
A ThinkCentre with FreeBSD works really well for my backups, especially with ZFS. And MikroTik RB4011 is probably overkill for such a small home setup, but it’s been interesting to learn RouterOS on something a bit more capable.
At work: I'll be writing a post-mortem describing the P1 outage we had last week and I'll be creating some new network usage alerts.
At home: I am going to try and start Effective C and see how that goes. Also, do some more eBPF exerc
$WORK: Getting my head back in the game as I feel that between my paternity leave and just holding it together the last few months with the baby and life has hindered my capacity to provide high level output. Back to updating myself, trying to articulate complex strategic plans and ideas. Trying to be kind also myself as I will fail due to the lack of focus, sleep and focus.
$LIFE: Selling most of my music making gear as I don't use them anymore and I am deeply questioning again what do with the music. I will try to get a easy jam set-up and a recording to just jam stuff and get that out there this year. Also, a lot of photo to be sorted, saved and some printed.
For work, I'm preparing for some intra-company consulting I'll be doing next week. I need to brush up on my React and Rails, and hopefully get access to their AWS account to start talking about their networking infrastructure. Its mostly looking at how the business operates their production facility and coming up with some feedback on how to push their software forward. Its pretty exciting honestly!
In my personal life I am going to take some serious time to go through my old un-finished tracks and hopefully come up with some good ideas for a new EP. Its been too long since I've worked seriously on music.
Fighting a too-complex environment.
So we provide a web IDE. Naturally, we use Kubernetes for that. Although that might have been a bad idea.
But we need a webapp on top. So we do it on Next.js (because we had a Next.js expert. Who sadly left.)
For deployment, this expert worked on Vercel, so we deploy to Vercel.
And some guys developed a SaaS template on top of Next.js and Supabase that gets us an initial boost.
But, for example (among many other things), we want to embed the web IDE in the Next.js site using iframes, deployed on different parts. And we want preview environments. And our web app is an OIDC identity provider because we need single-sign on across the web IDE and our webapp.
And of course, no one manages k8s so you run it on AWS EKS. And use Terraform to automate all the things.
CHAOS PURE CHAOS. I'm actually having fun learning Terraform (it's elegant once you understand it) and making things work, but I normally end my day exhausted from all the complexity...
Finishing one job interview series with the final interview with the CTO, lets see how that goes. And still waiting on a response from Apple regarding the interview.
I have a perfect quote for interviews or 1-2-1s, have you seen Jon Jones vs Daniel Cormier chat?
Hey P**, Are You Still There..?
you can find it on youtube, legendary meeting starter :D
