Ben Mask

Overview Here’s a short one! Ever run into the following with Nix? error: experimental Nix feature 'nix-command' is disabled; add '--extra-experimental-features nix-command' to enable it Let’s talk about it Flakes are experimental? So flakes are experimental? Yes, in Nix flakes are still gated as experimental. Want to get around it quickly? nix --extra-experimental-features 'nix-command flakes' flake check For a longer term ease of use you are better off just enabling this permanently:...

Overview I’ve recently been setting up my new machine. As I’ve been more exposed to Nix and Flox I’ve been steering away from local containerization where possible, however, that is not always an option. Part of me has been hesitant to install Docker Desktop to my new laptop. Some of that is just my own leanings. I don’t want to be asked to sign in to things I shouldn’t need to, I don’t enjoy apps which proliferate large amounts of data in my system leaving me trying to scour and clean up when I am ready to remove those apps....

Overview This week I discovered the writing and work of Steph Ango. Steph is the CEO of Obsidian, has a background in biology and industrial design, and has some really interesting ideas around design, consumption, and creativity that I’ve enjoyed diving into. He hosts a blog here and the Dialectic podcast from Notion has a great long-form interview with Steph about how he views work, building teams, products, and more....

Overview I recently started hosting Immich on my homelab. If you’re not familiar with Immich, it is a self-hosted Google Photos replacement. If you want to learn more I highly reccomend giving a listen to this podcast interview with the creator of Immich on the Self-Hosted podcast. The goal of this post is to cover how I set this up and some of the obstacles I faced in the process....

Big Idea Getting under the hood of database implementations is becoming an area of growing interest for me. Early in my career, I was always content with SQL as an interface to a datastore that “just works.” That is, until it doesn’t anymore. It’s at those points that I am now being pushed to understand why a particular database implementation has certain behavioral characteristics in different circumstances. Further, I have never crossed paths with a professional DBA and often feel like there’s a whole sphere of mystery for me here....

Big Idea In this post I want to capture some introductory notes to async programming in Python. I want to capture the motivation for async programming, some examples of how async implemented in Python via the high-level apis of Python’s stdlib async programming module: asyncio, and finally I want to explore the mechanics of the event loop which enable async programming. Motivation: The Problem of IO Bound Programs The goal of Python’s asyncio is module is improving the efficieny of IO bound programs....

Big Idea For a while the K8s cluster in my homelab has been in the precarious situation of only having a single master node. This has bitten me a couple of times when the master node (i.e the “server node” in k3s) has been snafu’ed. Now that I have compute available on my proxmox server, I want to take the time to virtualize two additional master nodes. Doing this will require understanding a few things at the outset:...

Big Idea I am getting to the stage of my career now where I have started picking up guiding principles that guide my socio-technical endeavors. I am sure I will continue to learn more and add them here or come back revise these with more wisdom and insight but what I want to start here is a collection of tenets. These tenets are not implementation details or design patterns but are more like paradigms for how we relate to problems, the natural systems that emerge from people thrown into teams, and more....

Big Idea The goal of this post will be to capture the steps required for the backup and restore process of my TrueNAS server. Currenty, my TrueNAS server consists of two 4TB drives in a vdev with a RAID1 (Mirror) config. My goal is to back this up to Backblaze’s S3-compatible B2 storage and test recovery before migrating data out of my old 1TB SSD. Once I have these backups in places the 3-2-1 rule will be satisfied:...

Big Idea I have been studying more systems desing more intentionally lately and this is the fruit of one evening of diagramming out a URL Shortner design. This post doesn’t explain much but a picture’s worth a thousand words!