/now

What I've been up to lately

What have I been up to this month?

• I've rebuilt this website in Eleventy. You can read a little more about the process if you're interested.

  • I also set up continuous deployments via GitHub and Netlify, which means I can simply push a change to GitHub, and Netlify will roll out a new build and deploy it for me. A whole lot easier (and faster!) than the custom rake task wrapper around s3cmd that I was using previously.

• A bunch of job-hunting things: updating my resume, my LinkedIn, etc.

• I've migrated to a new-to-me refurbished MacBook Air M1 (2020). Accordingly, I've been working on a new version of my workstation-builder repo for macOS Sequoia. So far, it allows:

  • fully automated setup of Homebrew and my preferred set up of apps for a developer workstation (covering formulae for CLI apps, casks for GUI apps, Mac App Store apps for the Australian and US stores, and any apps I need from my personal Homebrew tap).
  • configuration of my preferred macOS defaults, heavily using the macOS defaults list site
  • set up of VSCodium (the de-Microsofted version of VSCode), extensions, and my preferences
  • set up of the LaTeX packages used in building my resume
  • set up of my personal dotfiles, and symlinking where needed

  Check it out here!

  Ideally my long-term plan is to migrate this to an Ansible playbook, so that when I add a computer to my inventory, I'll get a functional dev machine out of it. The even-longer-termm plan would be to have versions that are current for each version of macOS I'm currently maintaining (at the moment, that's High Sierra, Catalina, Monterey, and Sequoia, due to hardware limitations), and have all the relevant devices managed under Ansible.

• Learning about the joys (not really) of domain management, having moved my website hosting from a simple public S3 bucket over to a Netlify page, and apparently breaking my MX records for Google in the process. Worse, it failed silently, meaning I just stopped receiving emails on one of my accounts for a while. I thought I had migrated all the settings from Route 53 back to Namecheap's DNS (Namecheap being my domain name provider), but it turns out that my Google workspace is not new enough to support the standard SMTP MX record that Google's admin tools suggest. so I've had to resort to using a legacy MX record I found buried in a support page. Ah, isn't internet plumbing great? It's just as messy as real plumbing sometimes.