Welcome to my Web site.

This site will reflect building some things from the ground up. This also serves as somewhat of an unformal and disorganized lab notebook.

The first bit of content will concern the construction of the site itself, which can be viewed in the Makefile.

About Me

By profession I'm a software engineer/architect and typically spend my days shepherding large scale distributed cloud systems. Outside of that I'm somewhat of a minimalist who pursues sustainability, a husband, father, musician, empiricist, and someone who needs to devote time to a wider range of hobbies.

Some more information about software will be tracked here

On January 25, 2024 this site seemed to be unresponsive starting at ~07:30 ET. Requests would result in a 500 error. The traffic itself seemed to not be reaching the application instances which to me suggests an issue with either the load balancer or some of the Knative/Cloud Run machinery (possibly related to cold starts). There was no obvious cause for this change based on the logs nor was the application reporting an issue. Restoring a previous revision and creating a new revision using the same image both resolved the issue so it is optimistically going to be ignored for the time being as a fluke. If it recurs further investigation will be done and information recorded (determing where the error itself is being thrown should indicate where there is undesirable state...presumably things getting stuck).

I also deploy my site for music to GCP, though that is currently using Hugo pushing to Cloud Storage. When I initially set it up I configured it for global access, but have since realized that costs me a small amount monthly... at the moment I'm not expecting the site to be covering any expenses and I'm not delusional enough to expect to need global coverage so I've gone back to reconfigure it to reduce such costs. It's certainly still not costly, but I'd expect these sites to typically fit comfortably within free'ish tiers.

Replacing the load balancer with a regional configuration would hopefully reduce the costs (I did knock the site offline for a brief period but continuing from the above this was unlikely to have any consequence for this site) but as of right now I'm still getting dinged for some lingering resources. I tracked down a static IP that needed to be removed, and there were also some lingering forwarding rules. I'll have to check the billing (or just wait a month to see if I'm still getting charged).

Ear Unclogging

Pinewood Derby

Cooking