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Who would've thought that I'd take a two year hiatus from writing on the personal blog? To be fair, I haven't stopped writing, but instead changed the focus towards my consulting company: Atelier Solutions. This was followed by starting the Tech Diligence mailing list. While the business side is targeting a different audience, I had always intended to keep this site around for the personal tech musings. Provided I had some time to spend on the tech.
While I've been neck deep in client work, the remaining time had been invested in building up the business and brand with mixed success. This also meant that the tech side has been relegated to whatever time I could squirrel away while working on client work. And maybe the occasional geeking out at a conference with friends.
For the tech I have been able to do, it has been solely infrastructure based: building up the company website or streamlining my own home infrastructure instead. This resulted in a long overdue and much needed re-platforming of my home website last year to account for running on a non-LTS release of Ubuntu. While okay initially, it is the major version upgrades that tend to bite. Especially when running things like PostgreSQL and Ruby for a few early scripts. What this means is a major re-platforming effort to maintain those few webapps that were more critical in the early years. Things like Bugzilla for issue tracking with home and client based projects, and Davical for the home calendar and address book.
While some of these have been phased out for SaaS based products (like ClickUp and Office 365 in my company's case), I still heavily leverage Davical. Not so much for the calendaring anymore, but definitely the address book portion. This part took quite a bit of time to migrate, and yes it did feed into a post or two on data migration scenarios in the Tech Diligence newsletter. This also meant that I never fully tested/successfully brought up the ruby scripts that I used for generating and managing the personal blog (the other reason for the absence).
Most of this changed at the beginning of this week as I began the process of transitioning my home infrastructure to a cloud hosted VM. It felt like the end of an era since I've been self-hosting the CABNetworks domain from my home for over 20 years. I've witnessed the growing difficulty of self-hosting over the years from the original ease of running your own website and mail server. Now, it is much more difficult from poor security on the devices themselves to the spamming of everyone via email, and even the illegal swapping of the hottest movies and music. It was just before the pandemic that I finally surrendered hosting my mail server at home due to my ISPs constantly blocking the port used for sending email, and more recently blacklisting entire networks due to their spam policies. Even now, I shunt my outgoing mail through AWS because they have a better chance of delivery than my lone VM hosted elsewhere.
On site, I tend to still host my web, ssh, and even a VPN server to access local resources. From a professional standpoint, this allowed me to access test systems while on-site with a client or demoing for a conference without needing to drop a few hundred dollars in hosting fees. Yet these days, I'm restricted to who I can use for an ISP, and on top of that, still find myself paying more than 5x the normal rate due to the quirks of my local setup.
While the jury is still out from the cost perspective (at least until I can capture the next few months of usage), the other primary driver for me is an upcoming move abroad where I won't be able to run my primary servers for a while. Plus I will still need to have a VPN into a local network for dev and client purposes. This, more than anything else, is what hit me as I started the migration and bring-up of the cloud based resources. Granted, if I really want to grow the business to include others, I really should have infrastructure that is not dependent upon the home network, but that is another conversation for another day.
In the meantime, it does feel like this is a moment of transition. Perhaps it is temporary until I find myself in more permanent digs, but the one bright spot is that it did prompt the first post in a few years.