This year was quite thick in events so I decided to write a year retrospect for a change. I read somewhere that people tend to do wild things when they’re nearing a “round” age like 30, except I read about this after I planned most of the stuff listed below… It definitely did turn into a very eventful 30th.
ArgoCD bootstrap cluster
I wish it could be completely automated… But for now I’ve just automated as much as possible (and convenient). The ingredients:
- Helm
- Sealed Secrets
- Argo CD and Argo Rollouts
- traefik
- Prometheus and Grafana
I have a repository for the purposes of playing around with Kubernetes tooling like this – and hopefully turn it into an actual application eventually. I have big plans and lots of stuff I want to try out, but time is limited. All the code examples in this post use the namespaces and naming choices in the repository. The folder structure (relevant to this bit) is like…
system
├┬ apps
│└─ (bootstrapped Argo CD app manifests)
├┬ argo
│└─ the local "umbrella chart" for Argo CD and Argo Rollouts
├┬ bootstrap
│└─ boilerplate project and application manifests
└┬ manifests
└─ manifests I didn't bother turning into a Helm chart
referenced by the raw-manifests.yaml application
Collapse of the docker0 bridge
We’ve got a printer in the office. I’m not sure how the network is organized, but it’s on a different IP range than the rest of the dev network. And for some reason I couldn’t get it to work.
Mitake & Otake
Mitake with its ropeway is probably “the” hiking destination in Tokyo. It’s accessible, not particularly high and you still get beautiful views. Oh, and crowds. Of course crowds.
Telegraf on Kubernetes with InfluxDB Cloud
I’ve had most of my stuff running a k3s “cluster” for the past half a year or so. The whole setup runs on a single $5-a-month Digital Ocean droplet with 1vCPU and 1GB of memory.
Needless to say, it doesn’t take much to bring the whole thing to its knees. While it has no issues dealing with the little traffic my blog receives, I would accidentally bring it down occasionally when I install a Helm chart that turned out to be much heavier than I’d thought.
Amagi
Not the carrier. Not the anime. The mountain. (After which the carrier was named, by the way.) It’s not one of those jagged, snow-capped “cool” mountains. It’s a relaxed, even comfy mountain. At 1400-and-a-little meters high with gentle slopes, it’s a good day’s escape from Tokyo’s chaos.
Hacktoberfest
After last year, I once again decided to take part in the Hacktoberfest fun. I have plenty of repositories lying around (sadly much less well maintained by yours truly than preferable). Of course this also means that I can gather the necessary contributions from updating dependencies in my own repositories, but I’d prefer to instead contribute to those dependencies.
Yari
Just a week after I did my three-day journey along the Jounen range, I went back to the Northern Alps for another round. This time I climbed Mt Yari. At 3180m it’s the fifth highest mountain in Japan, and second highest in the Northern Alps after Hotaka. The Yari-Hotaka ridge is something I’d like to try eventually (it’s famously challenging), but this wasn’t that time.
Shira to Baranco
Living in a city for most of the time it’s always surprising just how clear the sky can be and how bright the stars can be once you’re in nature. That struck me at Mti Mkubwa too, the first camp on Kilimanjaro. “Oh, so that’s why it’s called the Milky Way!”
We started the day with a dancing-singing introduction from the porters and guides. It felt like we were at leisure of time, in no rush whatsoever. We woke up “early” of course (compared to when I’d normally wake up) but only left well past eight.
Ocean @ Tokyo
The Ocean was one of the first “djent bands” in my library, so I was really happy when I heard that they will be playing live in Tokyo. It was also my first time visiting the famous Shimo-Kitazawa area and also ages since the last time I’d been to such a small venue.
I didn’t realize there would be four (!) other bands playing too, The Ocean had all my attention. Some of them were more experimental (reminding me of Deafhaven) while others less so, but to be honest after a while they just felt long.
But the wait was worth it, as The Ocean delivered magnificently. It was also fun to see the community culture centered around the venue. Reminded me a lot of the university music club.
