As an application developer, I wanted to get more of an appreciation (and independence) of functions as a service (faas) (i.e. serverless). There is a product called OpenFaaS that is a framework for setting up your own serverless provider. This is akin to setting up your own AWS Lambda, Azure Functions, or Firebase Functions. The trouble is that I felt I had already wasted enough time fiddling with Kubernetes and other related technologies that frankly were too much for my needs.

But out of nowhere I ran into faasd. faasd is a light weight version of OpenFaaS services that allows me to throw up functions on a VM or even a RaspberryPi. Of course I dived right in, thinking this would be as simple as a download, install, run kind of operation. Oh how I was wrong. Even with its light weighty-ness, it requires a pretty vast knowledge of systems and networking to get going correctly. Additionally, this is a very immature product that doesn't have the friendly and polished UX that I was hoping for. None the less, its what we've got and I was determined to get it going.

The Environment​

I was recently taking some training through work. In this training I was provided a VM that contained all of the course labs and tools. As an avid VSCode user I naturally pointed my Remote SSH extension at the VM to remotely connect via VSCode.

The moment I entered my credentials I got a message like:

VSCode is not supported on the target architecture.

The Environment​

Sometimes when you work in different environments there are different security policies that inevitably make my job very difficult if not damn near impossible. I can usually figure out something out that is incredible inefficient and just let the customer pay the additional cost. I ran into one of these environments the other day where I was given a VM to perform my development from. This VM was pretty locked down, but it did provide me sudo to docker. I thought, "Great, as long as we have docker, we should be good!" ... oh boy was I wrong.

The Equipment​

Interested in building something that doesn't require a laptop or TV for Raspberry Pi input/output, I recently purchased a TFT Display with some input buttons. It additionally included a very profession looking aluminum case with real metal button and some other goodies.

Be Back In 5​

Looks like this site is doing that thing where its lost its initial motivation. I have continued writing but haven't been able to actually publish due to a number of personal issues. In the spirit of public learning and personal documentation in general, I've decided to write up a quite update on some of the things I've been working on.

If you've read any of this blog before June 2021, you'll notice something things have changed. This is because I've moved everything to a new blog engine, Docusaurus.

When I first started writing blog articles I felt like I was learning a lot of new topics every week and I had a lot of follow up thoughts and opinions on the subject. I felt this flood of information made for good material that had a good mix of something new and opinions on the subject. In contrast, more often through out my life I have an abundance of opinion or knowledge but not a mix of the two.

During the 2020 plague, when I finished my graduate degree, I decided that I was going to continue writing. I found writing to be a way for me to ramble without burdening my peers. I also get the added benefit of reflection and self documentation that I've frankly been lacking in my life.

Its been awhile since I've made a post due to a bunch of family related things and attempting to get over a feature hump in the current mobile application I've been working. The mobile app design and organization is beginning to gel into something I feel comfortable investing in. Therefore I spent the last weekend wiring up my continuous integration infrastructure for what I hope to be the rest of the application's life cycle.

Overview​

In many situations, when writing statements or commands, I want to orient the command so that it presents well vertically. While we write statements and commands for readability we nearly always have to consider the horizontal constraints before the vertical constraints. The only time I hit a vertical constraint is really with run on functions or inline documentation.

Overview​

Sometimes when writing test scripts in shell script I want to perform some networking functionality. Instead of hard coding this values I'll parameterize them or read them from a .env (dotenv) file.