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For many years now I’ve had at least one machine at home which would work as a server to host some apps. In the last couple of years I’ve been getting more into it which has led me to purchase additional hardware. I’ve decided it would be nice to document my journey so I’ll try to make a post like this - detailing the setup that I currently have with both the hardware and the software once a year. ...

My homelab consists of 4 machines currently. When choosing them I tried to be energy conscious - using hardware which would not consume too much electrical power, while still trying to maintain the up-front cost low. These are mostly older systems and I was unable to find decent power consumption numbers for them. The specs 1x MSI Cubi 3 Silent NUC CPU Dual-core i5-7200U RAM 2×16GB 2x Lenovo ThinkCentre M910 Tiny ...

I’ve been using Umami analytics on this blog for quite some time now. I self host an instance on my homelab. I spent a bit of time researching self-hosted analytics and generally they had a few issues. First, I’d like the analytics platform to be privacy focused. No cookies, GDPR compliant, no PII. Umami checks this mark. Second, many of the alternatives had quite a bit of hardware resource overhead once hosted. They would either consume a ton of memory, the cpu usage would be high or require me to host something like ClickHouse to run them. Since this blog is not the new york times I feel like hosting a specific database for it would be overkill. My homelab is rather small, so keeping things minimal is how I manage to stretch it. Umami consumes around 1% of a CPU core and ~240MiB of RAM on my homelab. ...

After reading the technicalwriting.dev post on embeddings I thought to myself - this seems like something that I can implement quite quickly and would serve as a good starting point for some hands on experience with machine learning. I want to start small, so something as simple as filling the related posts section of this blog seems like an ideal candidate to get my hands dirty. This blog is made with Hugo and uses the related content feature which provides a list of related posts based on the tags & keywords you use. While I have no quarrels with the mechanism, I thought this would be a good place to try and experiment with embeddings. ...

About cache stampedes I often end up in situations where I need to cache this or that. Often, these values are cached for a period of time. You’re probably familiar with the pattern. You try to get a value from cache, if you succeed, you return it to the caller and call it a day. If the value is not there, you fetch it(most likely from the database) or compute it and the put it in the cache. In most cases, this works great. However, if the key you’re using for your cache entry gets accessed frequently and the operation to compute the data takes a while you’ll end up in a situation where multiple parallel requests will simultaneously get a cache miss. All of these requests will independently load the from source and store the value in cache. This results in wasted resources and can even lead to a denial of service. ...

SQLC has become my go-to tool for interacting with databases in Go. It gives you full control over your queries since you end up writing SQL yourself. It then generates models and type safe code to interact with those queries. I won’t go over the basics here, if you feel like it you can try their interactive playground. Dynamic queries Frequently I end up needing to filter the data by a set of fields in the database. This set of fields is often determined by the caller, be it via REST API or other means. This means that the code I’m writing has to support dynamic queries, where we query by a subset of fields. ...

I’ve seen many discussions about whether Go should add enum support to the language. I’m not going to bother arguing for or against but instead show how to make due with what we have in the language now. A very short enum intro Enumerated types, or enums, represent finite sets of named values. They are usually introduced to signal that variables can only take one of the predefined values for the enum. For example, we could have an enum called Colors with members Red, Green, Blue. Usually, the members are represented as integer values, starting from zero. In this case, Red would correspond to 0, Green to 1 and Blue to 2 with Red, Green and Blue being the names of corresponding members. They help simplify the code as they are self-documenting and explicitly list all possible values for the given type. In many languages enums will also return compile errors if you’ll try to assign to an invalid value. However, since enums do not exist in Go, we do not have such guarantees. ...

When you install TrueNAS SCALE your NAS runs a Netdata. You can verify that by executing systemctl status netdata in the TrueNAS shell. I use Netdata to monitor my homelab and have a parent set up for long term metric storage. I’d love to configure the NAS to also push metrics to a parent, so that I can access them all from a single place. Normally, if you want to set up streaming in Netdata it’s enough to edit /etc/netdata/stream.conf. However, I wouldn’t recommend doing this on a TrueNAS install for a couple of reasons. Firstly, this is not a recommended way of adjusting configuration and that is clearly evident when you open up the TrueNAS shell: ...

I was working on a project that uses PostgreSQL and as part of my task I needed to write a migration. The migrations are written as plain SQL and applied using the migrate library. The migration itself was not that complex, some rows needed to be updated where a column matched one of the values in a list. In my rush, I’ve opted for a rather simple query that went something like this: ...

I’ve written in the past that this blog is a playground for me to try various tools and play with code around it. Jenkins has been my choice as the CI for it since the start, mostly since it was something I’m used to. However, I’ve also stated that running it on an old laptop with no real backups is a recipe for disaster. I have since rectified the issue by hiding the laptop under a box in a closet but that meant moving away from Jenkins to something that’s lighter and more portable. The choice is the self-hosted enterprise edition of Drone. ...