Dealing with being sick is no way ever fun. I was caught with a cold at the beginning of last week, and it’s only this mid-week that I’m beginning to feel more like myself. As such, any energy I had for doing any work whatsoever went into mostly busy work: reorganizing my projects, establishing an improved and consistent naming convention for my repositories, and updating the notes in an Obsidian vault designed specifically to catalogue all my dev endeavors.

As I started feeling better, I began to consider how I might improve my workflows. I had a bit of clean up to do in a compose file for the Hyperion Archive to improve security and as I worked to understand AnythingLLM’s document embedding abilities, I happened upon a NIST document for container security. The document mentioned container-specific operating systems, and coupled with Ansible playbooks I’ve been writing, this got me thinking, what if I developed my own Linux distribution? This, of course, took me down another rabbit hole, where I discovered …

Linux From Scratch

Linux From Scratch (LFS) is such an incredible endeavor. I expected to have to learn how to piece together a distribution ad-hoc, as this is how i’ve managed to learn so much of what I now understand in development, administration, deployment, and security. Considering this, tumbling across this project was a breath of fresh air. I don’t expect building my own distro will be easy, even with the guidance provided by this project. However, I am largely excited to find a bit of a roadmap to follow and a platform where I may find guidance, which will make this journey far more accessible than I had hoped. I’m so excited to get started, I read through the introductory segments of the LFS book as well as the recommend reading.

learning Python

Now, as if that wasn’t enough, and as if i don’t already have a million projects i’m working on, I’ve decided to learn Python. This is largely motivated from my work in developing an Ansible collection. Modules for collections are largely written in Python, and as such, you’re required to set up a Python environment in order to load the Ansible developer tooling. Well, I made it that far, might as well just take it all the way, I suppose. I learned how to set up a Python environment and install, upgrade, and manage Python packages well before ever writing my first line of Python code. I find this rather hilarious.

nevertheless, i am excited to step foot on this path. i hope to write modules and plugins for my Ansible collections one day, and write scripts for all manner of automating tasks. part of me wishes i’d started sooner, but damn, there’s so much to fuckin’ learn and so much of it is downright fascinating.

anyway, if you made it this far, find me Bluesky and drop me a line :)