It's been a while since I last published something I thought valuable enough to share. To be frank, I'm not sure I have anything worth sharing now, but I want to write! So I'm force myself to disregard the material value of my output and share a snippet of what I've been doing in our last few cycles around the earth!

Two years ago I started a new job as a Software Engineer at a pretty cool company that's trying to change how people design, plan, and sell products (we recently raised some money, so if you're looking for a job, hit me up!).

This new role was filled with exciting new challenges. The most exciting and challenging was that the entire product was built on AWS Lambda. Everything was a function. No servers. No containers. No spinning disks. No cpu utilization maps. No htop. I effectively went from managing a $30,000/month AWS spend on EC2 instances to $0.

Adult Tamagotchi

Two and a half years later, I can say with utmost confidence that I miss servers. I don't miss when they were over-utilized and crashed. Nor when they gorged up electricity (and AWS credits with it) while idle. But i viscerally miss the feeling of a server being ALIVE and knowing that I was its caretaker. I, along with fellow server admins, may suffer from a particularly undiagnosed form of Stockholm syndrome. The servers haunted us, and we craved their ungiving approval. Servers were my own adult Tamagotchi , and someone paid me good money to take care of them (not as an SRE, mind you, since I was part of a small startup team that couldn't afford modern SRE salaries, so we were called Backend Engineers).

To indulge my cravings for some server management, I have been dabbling with Coolify for the last few weeks. And dang it's pretty cool! As of this writing, Coolify is on version v4.0.0-beta.346 . The version semantics alone should tell you all you need to know about how production-ready-but-kinda-beta Coolify development seems to be. Since I am not planning on hosting critical apps on my servers, I don't mind using beta software. Keeping this mindset has helped me appreciate how amazing this tool is, and how i wished i had it when I was just learning about server management on my first job.

I am unbridled enough by ego to admit that I'll often do something based on its cool-factor rather than its utility. This project is squarely in that category. Woah, did i just say PROJECT? Is this a project? This is a project the same way that SpongeBob is a sponge. Technically, yes, but also no. It's not a project mainly because it doesn't have an end goal, rather it serves a gray explorative end which may come in the form of dementia rather than applause and reflection.

Is Spongebob a sponge? This blog writer doesn't accept polls, so vote with your email. I will read them sans judgement.

Goals

Hosting Cool Experiments

One of the main reasons I wanted a server of my own is to try to host a bunch of experiments on it. Coolify itself is an experiment for me!

I've run some other experiments as well (using Coolify to manage/run them).

Here's a simple background removal tool I stood up as part of an evaluative exploration for the best background removal techniques out there. It's slow but it works well!

I'm also hosting a web-based code editor that's coming in handy when i don't have access to my powerful machine!

Another experiment is this blog that's hosted on the same server. How neat!

Finding Problems

As I experiment with different ideas and solutions, I am keeping my eyes open for problems that seem interesting to approach. This will be a test both to my ability to recognize problems and to evaluate their worth.

Historically, I have had a bad habit of being sidetracked by small problems that nest into a rabbit hole. I want to test myself and see if I can focus myself to fixing the main problem.

The good news is that I'm already finding some interesting problems like fixing the library i used for image background removal. It was cool to see that I had enough experience to contribute back to open source projects.

🤔 Maybe I'll contribute to Ghost (this blog's host) and add a polls feature. Or a cool annotation feature (a must-have for writers with a strongly tangential, diverging style like myself).

Writing Again

Writing this blog post was painful. I struggled to find the right words, and I often found myself abandoning the search. This battle with the dictionary highlights the need for me to return to writing, however intermittent the effort or unimportant the topic. To do something, anything, is better than doing nothing at all.