Why Blog? Why Now?

The Background

So all of us in the tech industry often find ourselves going to Google for answers, and more often than not land on some blog where some other poor soul has suffered through the same turmoil we are going through, but that brilliant individual not only found the answer but thank the lord they actually documented it.

Well, there has been more than one occasion where I am doing something weird and I have been the one that has to find the solution. Like how to bootstrap a Palo vFW onto a Cisco ENCS box running NFVIS, or how to do some wild regex on header manipulation rules on an acme packet session border controller… you know weird niche stuff. And I’ve thought “I should blog this”. I can be one of these brilliant thought leaders and be a hero to some poor sap out there. And I even went so far as to stand up the scaffolding for a blog in S3 using hugo and route53, because lord knows my web coding skills are terrible so I have to use an SSG, but I’m not about to pay for some WYSIWYG editor because I’m an “advanced user” goddamit. But I’ve never actually commited to the blog. I’ve never just sat down and did the work because I get into some other rabbit hole or have some other fire to put out.

So here we are, we are gonna try to get back on this horse again. The motivation this time was really about: fuck big tech. It started with the streaming services. Just nickel and diming us for every feature and price hikes and exclusives and content sprawl. When I discovered the miracle that is the Sonarr/Radarr/NZBget/Jellyfin combo… and I can run all that as K8s pods on my truenas scale server… and it’s a miles better UI/UX than any of the big players (maybe a future post on this topic) that was the spark that said to me, fuck the big guys, the open source community is way better at this!

Now that streaming was solved, I started looking at the rest of my house, which is riddled with disparate IoT smart things from a myriad of different vendors all attempting to interop through google home and poorly so. I started researching if there is a better way, which naturally lead me to homeassistant, far from a new topic to anyone that’s dabbled in any home automation use cases beyond what google and alexa can do. But what is new is matter. So I thought, ok here I can actually do something that is new, that is interesting and maybe I can discover some things that someone else will find useful along the way, so here we are.

The Blog Requirements

So I had a goal:

Drop all the random IoT apps cluttering up my phone and the terrible and limited google home integrations.

I had a solution:

Start adopting matter/thread and move everything into home assistant

Now what are the requirements for the blog to document this process? I started thinking about it and I had a few criteria I wanted to meet:

• it had to be simple to push out content, no complicated platforms
• it had to embrace my open-source lifestyle direction
• i had to own the content and be able to take it with me wherever I wanted
• it had to not look like shit, I am a man of taste after all
• hosting needs to be free or dirt cheap

To that end what i landed on was jekyll and github pages. The content is just markdown, the hosting is free with github, it looks good with themes, and if i wanted to I can bring it over to gitlab or do the build step myself and publish elsewhere. Now of course its me and i couldnt just leave things as is and have gone down a rabbit hole of custom theme modifications and css tinkering (maybe post on that later?) But the blog is up, its looking (mostly) the way I want it to. We are writing content and I got my HA environment all set up and my first devices onboarded… which will be the topic for the next post. See you guys there. Cheers! 🍻