Blog
Kicking it of - somewhat
Just like I refrained from doing a “looking a back on the year”-post, I won’t do a look ahead on 2022.
However the last couple weeks I spent starting the yearly fairly slow (also due to an inflammation of my left middle ear. I tell you: one of the lesser fun things to have).
Between the years (the german phrase for the time between christmas and new years) I did some nice deep digging into ansible and enjoyed undusting my ansible skills. It reminded me how important it is to sometimes take some time to thoroughly go over things and take time to understand how pieces fit together.
You have to go slow, in order to be able to go fast ;)
This saying comes from road cycling and refers to: one has to do a lot of foundation work in order to be become faster overall.
Reading habit
The first book that I’ve read this year was Making work visible- a really really good and hands-on book on identifying and handling time thiefs. Really good starter for the year. It is one of those books that once you’ve read it, you think: “why, why did I not read this earlier”. It is a quick read, so go for it. Generally all the stuff that is published by IT Revolutionis really good. Next book in the queue is The delicate Art of Bureaucracy.
The keys to the castle
Recently I’ve started to tinker with some hardware tokens like the Yubikey 5 NFC and Nitrokey 2. Am still waiting for my Nitrokey 3 to be delivered. I came across a really good github repo that does an excellent deep dive for setting up all the common use-cases with the yubikey. These are:
- Using the yubikey with your GPG keys for signing and encrypting via GPG
- Using the yubikey to authenticate you ssh sessions
There are severals ways of dealing with SSH and a yubikey. The one outlined in that document is to go through gpg-agent. Another way is to use the PKCS#11 interface of the smartcard directly from ssh. There is an article on undeadly that gives a good overview. If you’re solemnly on a macOS machine, this post on evil martians covers all the bits as well. I’ll cover my setup in a separate, detailed post.
Another bit from the crypto department: With PGPainless 1.0.0 a wrapper around BouncyCastle for easy interaction with PGP stuff has been released.
2022 will be the year of linux on the desktop ;)
Couldn’t resist to pull that one - ;) However I did actually start a personal experiment end of last year that will accompany me throughout 2022. For many years my main machine has been a mac. I have my workflows mostly in shape on macOS but in the past months, I’ve missed working from OpenBSD and Linux machines. I got myself the Tuxedo Infinitybook Pro 14 Gen 6 (the one I covered a few months ago) and am using that next to my mac. I’ll report back every now and then how this works out. Right now I’m trending towards sticking with the macOS/iPad stuff for the conceptual stuff, while doing the deep technical work from the OpenBSD/Linux machines. Which brings me to one of my long-term backlog items: Blogging about my workflows. ;)
CSPs in 2021 and some more gaia-x
Apparently the CSPs of the world like to do ‘Year in review’ posts. Reviews I came across are:
Somehow I missed this article in the german magazine ‘WirtschaftsWoche’ on Gaia-X: ‘Gaia-X wird keine europaeische Cloud schaffen”.
Dev and Tools
For newcomers to concurrency in go, I really recommend this article on visualizing go concurrency.
I came across the https://leanpub.com/the-tao-of-tmux/read - tmux is one of those tools where I just use the real basics, so this is really good ;) Recently I did some more stuff with ansible and docker and thought, I might as well should do it with podman. As such this post (on german) by Dirk just came in time.
The aiven people blogged about improvements that they contributed and that will be part of postgresql 15.
With that, let’s get some kicking into 2022 ;)