You can get all my Insiders' Updates in the The Treasure Trove 🏝 along with discounts on my eBooks and inlets PRO.
My new workbench for making woodworking easier and more comfortable. It also brought me joy to see it come to life in a short period of time.
Last weekend I started a big project to make my woodworking hobby easier and more comfortable. It started by finding a plan I thought would fit my needs, going ahead and pricing up and sourcing timber, taking a drive to the store and lifting a good 10-12 boards off the display and checking if they were level, then cutting them up in the car park and driving home.
I've certainly grown in my skills, experience and knowledge since I rekindled my interest in woodworking in May. This bench is a night and day difference in sturdiness and construction compared to my bench / desk that you can see in the background. I've sent out almost a dozen wrist rests and each one is getting better.
All that took quite some energy and I don't know if you've ever felt reluctance to start something big, that involves spending money or making a commitment that could fail or backfire.
This week I wanted to recommend a couple of books:
Jeff presents his take on why starting is so easy, but finishing is so hard and filled with temptation to procrastinate. He outlines a number of approaches for overcoming the problem and I got I a lot out of it at the time.
He pins the blame on perfectionism, but if we're new to something, then we are likely to make some mistakes. Most of the time, mistakes can be made right, or used as a learning experience to help us on our journey.
In Open Source, I often see contributors arrive with immense energy, they are almost overwhelming in their level of engagement, and then after a set period of time (6-12 months) they disappear. After making a personal investment in someone, it can be hard not to take it personally on some level, whatever the reason for their leaving.
Jeff suggests that performing or working at an unsustainable level is often why we quit, because we soon realise that we can't keep that going and instead of figuring out what a good balance is, we just quit.
In Andy Hertzfeld's book on the Macintosh, he describes how they’d come back into the office after dinner and work late into the night. People who’ve never experienced the thrill of working on a project they’re excited about can’t distinguish this kind of working long hours from the kind that happens in sweatshops and boiler rooms, but they’re at opposite ends of the spectrum.
That’s why it’s a mistake to insist dogmatically on "work/life balance.” Indeed, the mere expression "work/life” embodies a mistake: it assumes work and life are distinct. For those to whom the word "work” automatically implies the dutiful plodding kind, they are. But for the skaters, the relationship between work and life would be better represented by a dash than a slash.
I wouldn’t want to work on anything I didn’t want to take over my life.
Of course, it's also OK to quit something, and that takes almost as much courage. Intensity and excitement are the spice of life, but joy can also be found in the steady and gradual progress towards a goal or lifestyle.
This is one of the biggest releases for inlets aka inlets PRO for the year so far.
The inlets 0.9.0 releases adds:
- A new
statusCLI command to monitor tunnels - Prometheus metrics for TCP and HTTP tunnels
- Load-balancing of requests between clients using TCP tunnels
- An ARM64 Darwin binary for Apple M1 users
The blog post shows you how to run Prometheus locally and explains what kinds of questions you can ask of each metric along with a micro-tutorial for you to try.
Here's what Nathan Peck of AWS had to say about it:
I've been using inlets recently. It is a super cool solution for creating tunnels between networks: home to office, home to cloud VPC, cloud VPC to on-prem, etc. Best part: no VPN, no open firewall ports, or IP ranges to deal with. And observability!
- Try the release candidate on GitHub: 0.9.0-rc2
- Read now: Measure and monitor your inlets tunnels
You may also like Engin's new blog post: How to run an inlets exit server on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure
Flux is a tool that helps with continuous deployment of code to Kubernetes. Weaveworks started the project and then donated it to the CNCF where it continued to grow and mature into a new v2 version.
Alistair Hey wrote up instructions on how to deploy OpenFaaS itself with Flux v2, and briefly touches on how to deploy functions using the OpenFaaS CRD.
So you'll learn how to keep OpenFaaS up to date, and also how to store which applications you want in your Kubernetes cluster in a Git repository.
Read now: Upgrade to Flux v2 to keep OpenFaaS up to date
Batuhan also wrote about how ArgoCD can be used for continuous deployment, ArgoCD is another popular tool for deploying applications to Kubernetes.
You can learn everything you need to know about building and deploying functions in a light-weight, portable way in my video workshop and eBook: Serverless For Everyone Else.
This weekend, I'm offering the complete package with a 50 USD discount, just buy the "DevOps Pro" tier before Monday to get the offer.
You can run OpenFaaS on a VPS from a few dollars per month, or on your Raspberry Pi for free:
faasd running on a Raspberry Pi 4000 by Talha Altınel
You'll learn what kinds of things you can run there in the eBook through practical examples including connecting to a database, monitoring and scheduled tasks.
Find out other use-cases: Exploring Serverless Use-cases from Companies and the Community
Check out the offer on Gumroad
I'd like to plan some live-streams with the next one being a walk-through the new inlets release. If you'd like to join me or have topic suggestions, please get in touch - you can just reply to this email.
Hope you have a restful weekend.
Feel free to email me at any time, or book a session in the Sponsors' Portal if you'd like to start some collaborative coaching as peers or just have a 1:1.