⚗️⚗️⚗️ pnathan ⚗️⚗️⚗️ @pnathan@mastodon.social

General offer to *everyone*:

I love getting email - paul@nathan.house

It's like Mastodon, but far less ephemeral. ;-)

I like talking Theology, being a Progressive Pentacostal Christian.

I also like talking Computer Science (databases and SRE topics in particular)

I also particularly appreciate talking history, with an interest in the volkisch thought.

And if you have a college thesis - I love reading them!!

Finally! Happy to read resumes of software engineers & line managers for review

If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged.

-- Richelieu

I'm not an anarchist and I reject their solutions & ideology; often considering their critique to be inadequate to manage the complexities of quotidian life.

n.b., I am aggressively muting posters who do a lot of jokey / inane toots.

if you do a lot of sort of posting and mention me, it probably won't get through - set up another account and poke me if its important enough.

Afternoon, ya'll.

Reminder that I have moved the bulk of my fediverse presence to @ pnathan @ social.seattle.wa.us!

It's a #Seattle / Puget Sound local focused instance, which I have been graciously allowed to help moderate by @Finn . We hope to turn it into a coop once we have enough interested members.

Good evening!

Reminder that I have moved the bulk of my fediverse presence to @ pnathan @ social.seattle.wa.us!

It's a #Seattle / Puget Sound local focused instance, which I have been graciously allowed to help moderate by @finn . We hope to turn it into a coop once we have enough interested members.

Hi! Morning reminder that I am moving some 95% of my fediverse presence to pnathan @ social.seattle.wa.us.

@pnathan

I'm in the process of migrating most of my fediverse presence over to @pnathan , a #seattle local server that I got asked to help start up.

So I'm pondering how to figure out a way to get credentials into jenkins via cooking the credentials.xml files prior to bringup.

this shouldn't be this hard.

and yes.

Jenkins is old tech, and very Java Enterprise coding. Not a good thing. I like it, because it is flexible. But it's not well adapted for cloud work with proper automated bringup.

I've spent days looking at automating installing credentials post-bring up. But the CSRF protection system is... not designed for automation. Nor is there a RPC system for within-process environment (within-pod) for injecting secure information.

Digressive note:

I think that it'd be much closer to technically well done to roll up all needed functionality into your k8s cluster (logs, monitoring, builds, etc) without relying on cloud facilities (i.e., build your own cloud in k8s). But this requires substantial technical investment, documentation, and hiring. Probably a good +5 on your SRE team. And, worse, is this something *interesting*? Can you retain people for this?

Banging away on how to build a fully automated #Jenkins, including credential injection on bringup.

Fully automated bringup, including secrets, is one of the fiddlier bits of #SRE work. If you're on AWS, AWS IAM and SecretsManager serve as the trust root....

... but not everything integrates with that! Such as Jenkins.

One of the things businesses like a lot today is outsourcing, which is what Cloud is, particularly AWS. So here we are.

(hashtags for search)

4-5 weeks of depression, visitors, and gastroenteritis threw my healthy living thing for a loop. Today I was able to cook breakfast (greens), have a healthy lunch, and lift weights. Haven't lifted for a month. I am going to hurrrt tomorrow. I will, consequently, need to do some light workout to deal with it.

Rode the ebike to the gym (as opposed to the bus). It's a blast, and was very nice at this hour, since the bus doesn't run much.... But also, driving among cars still scares me.

"In blue Seattle, Trump supporters are starting to come out of hiding"

https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/in-blue-seattle-trump-supporters-are-starting-to-come-out-of-hiding/

I did some research myself: the billionaire has donated some 50K to 45's PACs.

It's tiring, but realize the facists are here in Seattle.

Honestly I wish I had a DSA poster just hanging out in my backpack.

Democrat Neoliberal Politics Don't Work: Vote Socialist and Follow the Red Rose.

But alas.

Saw a flyer in Capitol Hill for hashtag RedPillSeattle. Arguing for #Seattle to go Republican. The background image was some homeless tents.

Redpilling refers to a conversation to the incel / alt right movement.

I tore the flyer down. We don't need that trash here.

well, that was about 400 emails I sludged through. A few are important, I'll address them over the weekend.

A lot of unsubscribes.

so I'm curious: for those who have executed campaigns with reasonable success in activist circles (and know a little about tech)- what would a backend software engineer do for you?

FWIW in 2016 I volunteered and wired together an website promoting Clinton, roughly 1M visits. It left me with ashes in my mouth: it didn't do enough, I don't think it changed the conversation and my skills were nearly pointless after it launched.

I see websites qua websites as infowar tools. true or false, they exist to promote a point of view, it's marketing. Useful but really you don't need me for that - just a CC for a domain and a wordpress account.

I've spent 3 years idly about software engineering and how it can directly relate to changing the cultural climate.

Most political campaigns are interested in voter databases, front end work (websites), and email/reachout systems. Cybersecurity work is generally unwanted by campaigns.

I see a lot of GIS being used by local activists.

As a backend/SRE chap, it's hard in my head to connect my work with cultural change.

Curious what others think here.

Ugh. International restrictions on buying / listening to songs are dumbbbbb.

(Nightwish, Century Child album).

tonight I will look into indexes for querying the data. It's just a fast-lookup data structure over a column.

here's the thing when you are deeply interacting with code at this level, possibilities of system design shimmer before you eyes like Lisp.

I'm definitely going to do the ABCL front end, it might be where I write the query planner itself.

Update. Csv loading accomplished.

Next will be indexes and a pass through of queries.

This is following out the path I etched out years ago, and avoiding technical rat holes I went into then. 😅

Following on to that will be seeing how Armed Bear can be used as the front end.

tonight I will keep grinding on my arbitrary query engine (similar in generalized notion to Apache Drill), but focused on local work.

I've wanted to do this for _forever_.