24 yaml files for config. The single src folder

Ayyy, remember how Canada capitulated on the digital service tax.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c62553ywn77o
https://www.canada.ca/en/department-finance/news/2025/06/canada-rescinds-digital-services-tax-to-advance-broader-trade-negotiations-with-the-united-states.html

Then trump threatens new tarrifs?
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cvg819n954mo

(I’m struggling to find new sources,. cause everything is about dropping the DST to allow further trade talks. Not the timeline of DST dropping and the further US tariffs. Maybe these are coincidental, maybe there was always gonna be more Canadian tariffs. Either way, it doesn’t matter. Canada got more blanket tariffs regardless of what they did. Speaks volumes to everyone else dealing with trump)

Trump is destabilising international trade. This doesn’t benefit the US. At all.

Interesting, I might check them out.
I liked garden because it was “for kubernetes”. It was a horse and it had its course.
I had the wrong assumption that all those CD tools were specifically tailored to run as workers in a deployment pipeline.

I’m willing to re-evaluate my deployment stack, tbh.
I’ll definitely dig more into flux and ansible.
Thanks!

Oh, operators are absolutely the way for “released” things.

But on bigger projects with lots of different pods etc, it’s a lot of work to make all the CRD definitions, hook all the events, and write all the code to deploy the pods etc.
Similar to helm charts, I don’t see the point for personal projects. I’m not sharing it with anyone, I don’t need helm/operator abstraction for it.
And something like cdk8s will generate the yaml for you to inspect. So you can easily validate that you are “doing the right thing” before slinging it into k8s.

Everyone talks about helm charts.
I tried them and hate writing them.
I found garden.io, and it makes a really nice way to consume repos (of helm charts, manifests etc) and apply them in a sensible way to a k8s cluster.
Only thing is, it seems to be very tailored to a team of developers. I kinda muddled through with it, and it made everything so much easier.
Although I massively appreciate that helm charts are used for most projects, they make sense for something you are going to share.
But if it’s a solo project or consuming other people’s projects, I don’t think it really solves a problem.

Which is why I used garden.io. Designed for deploying kubernetes manifests, I found it had just enough tooling to make things easier.
Though, if you are used to ansible, it might make more sense to use ansible.
Pretty sure ansible will be able to do it all in a way you are familiar with.

As for writing the manifests themselves, I find it rare I need to (unless it’s something I’ve made myself). Most software has a k8s helm chart. So I just reference that in a garden file, set any variables I need to, and all good.
If there aren’t helm charts or kustomize files, then it’s adapting a docker compose file into manifests. Which is manual.
Occasionally I have to write some CRDs, config maps or secrets (CMs and secrets are easily made in garden).

I also prefer to install operators, instead of the raw service. For example, I use Cloudnative Postgres to set up postgres databases.
I create a CRD that defines the database, and CNPG automatically provisions all the storage, pods, services, config maps and secrets.

The way I use kubernetes for the projects I do is:
Apply all the infrastructure stuff (gateways, metallb, storage provisioners etc) from helm files (or similar).
Then apply all my pods, services, certificates etc from hand written manifests.
Using garden, I can make sure things are deployed in the correct order: operators are installed before trying to apply a CRD, secrets/cms created before being referenced etc.
If I ever have to wipe and reinstall a cluster, it takes me 30 minutes or so from a clean TalosOS install to the project up and running, with just 3 or 4 commands.

Any on-the-fly changes I make, I ensure I back port to the project configs so when I wipe, reset, reinstall I still get what I expect.

However, I have recently found https://cdk8s.io/ and I’m meaning to investigate that for creating the manifests themselves.
Write code using a typed language, and have cdk8s create the raw yaml manifests. Seems like a dream!
I hate writing yaml. Auto complete is useless (the editor has no idea what format the yaml doc should take), auto formatting is useless (mostly because yaml is whitespace sensitive, and the editor has no idea what things are a child or a new parent). It just feels ugly and clunky.

So uplink is 500/500.
LAN speed tests at 1000/1000.
WAN is 100/400.
VPN is 8/8.

I’m guessing the VPN is part of your homelab? Or do you mean a generic commercial VPN (like pia or proton)?

How does the domain resolve on the LAN? Is it split horizon (so local ip on the lan, public IP on public DNS)?
Is the homelab on a separate subnet/vlan from the computer you ran the speed test from? Or the same subnet?

No.
I tried a smart watch for a week or so, and hated wearing it.
Hadn’t worn a watch in 20 years, and it felt very strange

I’m always nervous about fintech companies. Maybe it’s time to get over that and give curve pay a spin.
The cashback seems nice, considering a lot of shops I use are on there.

Not if you use wildcard dns records.

Yup, true.

But contactless via a phone can have no limit.
Adding a debit card to phone case means the upper limit is £100. Which is actually fine, and is the limit I have normally set for phone contactless. But I can instantly remove that limit via my banking app.

And the phone needs to be unlocked to make a payment.
Do if I lose my phone anyone can charge £100 to the debit card.

Servers: one. No need to make the log a distributed system, CT itself is a distributed system.

The uptime target is 99%3 over three months, which allows for nearly 22h of downtime. That’s more than three motherboard failures per month.

CPU and memory: whatever, as long as it’s ECC memory. Four cores and 2 GB will do.

Bandwidth: 2 – 3 Gbps outbound.
Storage:
3 – 5 TB of usable redundant filesystem space on SSD or.
3 – 5 TB of S3-compatible object storage, and 200 GB of cache on SSD.
People: at least two. The Google policy requires two contacts, and generally who wants to carry a pager alone.

Seems beyond you typical homelab self hoster, except for the countries that have 5gbps symmetric home broadband.
If anyone can sneak 2-3gbps outbound pass their employer, I imagine the rest is trivial.
Altho… “At least 2 [people]” isn’t the typical self hosting

Edit:
Tried to fix the copy/paste.

Also will add:

https://crt.sh/
Has a list of all certificates issued.
If you are using LE for every subdomain of your homelab (including internal), maybe think about a wildcard cert?
One of those “obscurity isn’t security”, but why advertise your endpoints? Also increases privacy (IE not advertising porn(dot)example(dot)com)

This… Except for contactless payment.
I used graphene for a month. It was lovely. Even things like banking apps worked.
I don’t care about absolute privacy, but I do care about controlling my privacy. Grapheme gave me that.

I had only 1 issue.
Contactless payment.
It’s extremely convenient to me, from public transport to groceries. I just bop my phone.

The fact that Google has that locked down surely violates some EU laws. But I’m sure they wave away the laws because of “financial security” or some other bullshit.
As if bank card NFC/contactless doesn’t suffer exactly the same issues.
I looked into some “graphene contactless payment” type systems or workarounds, and I couldn’t find anything that would fill the gap.

Eventually, yes

I don’t use it anymore though because I found the suggestions to be annoying and distracting most of the time and got tired of hitting escape

Same. It took longer for me to parse and validate the suggestion as it did for me to just type what I wanted.

I do like the helper for more complex refractors.
Where you have a bunch of similar, but not exactly the same, changes to make.
Where a search & replace refactor isn’t enough.
It manages to figure out what you are doing, highlights the next instance of it and suggests the replacement.
I don’t think I’ve seen it make a mistake doing that, and it is a useful speedup.
I guess the LLM already has all the context: the needle, the haystack and the term.

Yeh, my example was pretty contrived and very surface level.
It grouped things that seemed related at a surface level but weren’t actually related at all. Which makes it a bad example.
And realistically, you would use a timer class that raised events, and passed in an interval class that could be constructed from any appropriate units.

It was more to highlight that types and classes are a fairly easy way to improve the context around variable.
It can also use type checker to show incorrect conversions between minutes and seconds, Polar and Cartesian coords, RGB and HSV, or miles and kilometers. Any number of scenarios where unit conversions aren’t a syntax error.

Yeh, absolutely.
Horses for courses.

I feel like variable or function names that become overly verbose indicate that a specific type or a separate class should be considered.
I see it as a mild code smell.

Something like int intervalSeconds = 5 could maybe have a type that extends an int called seconds. So then you are declaring seconds Interval = 5.
It describes the unit, so the variable name just describes the purpose.
You could even add methods for fromMinutes etc. to reduce a bunch of (obvious) magic numbers elsewhere.

To extend this contrived example further, perhaps there are a couple of intervals. A refresh, a timeout and a sleep interval.
Instead of having.

int sleepIntervalSeconds = 0;
// etc...

You could create an intervals class/object/whatever.
So then you have.

public class Intervals {
    public seconds Sleep
    public seconds Refresh
    public seconds Timeout
}

The class/object defines the context, the type defines the unit, and you get nice variable names describing the purpose.

Why do you dislike PHP?

Of course a US company is going to jack up prices to cover the import tariffs. They aren’t going to eat the loss.
So who is paying that tariff, that increase in cost?
Let’s break it down:
Is it the government of Canada: No.
Is it the company in Canada exporting the good: No.
Is it the company in the US importing the good: No (they increase prices to cover the tariff).
Is it the consumer in the US buying the good from the US company: Yes.

So, does Canada pay the tariff? No.
Does US pay the tariff? Yes.

It’s the US citizen that is paying more to cover the tariff. The “visible” result of the tariff is that the US pays more.
The money goes back to the US government, so it stays within the US. But IT IS AN ADDITIONAL TAX TO US COMPANIES AND CONSUMERS.

So trump can slap a 200% tariff on something, and the US (companies or citizens) will have to pay that tariff.

Canada doesn’t pay ANY of it.
They might see a decline in sales towards the US. They will be incentivised to diversify their exports, which means they will rely less on their trade with the US.

Tariffs makes sense if it’s a 10-year plan to return manufacturing to a country, where the proceeds of the tariff fold back into the economy as investments (along with additional investments) in the manufacturing they are trying to bring back to the country. Gives companies notice, let’s people get trained, and a decade later it’s cheaper to produce a part locally than it is to import it from abroad.

Massively swinging tariffs every few weeks, throwing a hissy fit because nobody is bending to your childish will, and driving an entire country into an isolated draconian society where foreign companies and talent don’t want to invest… Not the way to leverage tariffs.

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