Home Assistant spurs my love of DevOps

I don't know if it was always there or if it has just happened, but for whatever reason, I am fascinated by DevOps, thanks to Home Assistant.

I love to tinker with things¹; I have robots I am looking forward to building, and some dev boards from ESPHome for Home Assistant that will allow me to wire up my dumb standing desk and make it smart², and more.

I've been using Home Assistant now for three years, and in that time my proficiency has increased rapidly, allowing me to become more proficient in asking the right questions, debugging errors, and making architectural design decisions for the things I build.

And with this comes my love of DevOps. I already have a fondness for InfoSec, and networking and DevOps are a natural extension of that.

I am going to writing more about my home lab on my other blog³.

Home Lab and life update

I was without income for four months and in that time my back rent piled up and when I finally got some of my income back, it was not enough to pay the back rent and my current rent at the same time. I knew eviction was coming, I was prepared for it, and it is here. The thing is, I am extremely lucky to have the support system I have in my home town now that my mom passed and my family, well, most of them, don't give a shit about me at all. This was a development I had not expected to learn about but that's another story.

For now, I am moving into a 1 story house with my friend's mom, have room to myself, and will store the things I don't have room for in storage.

As far as the home lab stuff, I have learned so much more about it that I picked up three NUCs on the cheap, a NUC rack, a patch panel and RJ45 inserts⁴, and gazillion DeWalt tools. I also picked up a four pack of Raspberry Pi Picos for $25.

I am taking the rack with me, I refuse to leave that in storage and while the room I will occupy is not as big as the one I've been stuck in for the whole year⁵ but there are certain things I can't compromise on: my desk, my bed, my TV and game systems, and my rack. The rest is going into storage⁶.

I am on the waitlist for an apartment that I lived in when I first came back home and I can't fucking wait to go back. Once I am back there, I am not leaving again. Ever. It is income controlled, not HUD controlled, but the apartment was a loft and huge; I'll have space for all my things.

Working on a smaller project

I am working on a popular posts component for whatever React framework you want to use. I am using Theme-UI so that a user can customize their component, TailwindCSS, Typescript, and StoryBook for prototyping.

The analytics are from Plausible (opens in a new tab) which has a really simple API that I can expose for configuring the component. I will be using axios and the Context API for data fetching and state management.

I've started building it. I can't wait to finish it.