Paul Tibbetts

Well this is a first.

Night 1 of the West Highland Way for me is a stay at Drymen Camping, eating pizza in my tent.

🍕⛺️

The 2 late week notes are delayed yet again. I’d hoped to write them on the train but the views heading to Scotland were too good to ignore.

At least I can see the way down.

⛰️ Moel Siabod

I climbed 872 metres for these views.

⛰️Moel Siabod

Bank holiday by the sea.

Got any tips for getting started with RSS readers?

I’ve installed NetNewsWire on my phone and laptop and they sync from FreshRSS which is running in my homelab.

Which feeds do you recommend?

The last step to setting up my new Micro.blog was to use it from my own domain.

I debated using it exclusively at paultibbetts.uk but I want to work on my own blog for that address.

So I’m going to use Micro.blog as… my microblog… at micro.paultibbetts.uk.

Instead of doing it by hand on Cloudflare’s website I wrote it down as code.

Infrastructure as Code

Writing down your infrastructure as code has a lot of benefits:

• it’s in one central place instead of spread out in different UIs on different sites
• it can be version controlled
• it can be readable by robots as well as other humans

You can use tools like Terraform, OpenTofu or Pulumi to do this.

Terraform

I’m using Terraform at the moment. I might look into Pulumi in the future.

Terraform uses HCL for its configuration.

main.tf

terraform {
  required_providers {
    cloudflare = {
      source  = "cloudflare/cloudflare"
      version = "~> 4.0"
    }
  }
}

My domain is managed by Cloudflare so at the start of my code I tell Terraform to use the cloudflare/cloudflare provider. This means I can manage different things in Cloudflare using a few settings.

provider "cloudflare" {
  api_token = var.cloudflare_api_token
}

Next I tell the Cloudflare provider to use a variable for my API token.

data "cloudflare_zone" "paultibbetts_dot_uk" {
  name = "paultibbetts.uk"
}

Originally I asked ChatGPT how to do this, and it was technically correct, but it wanted me to go on the Cloudflare site, go to my domain, and copy the zone_id to pass in as a variable. Which is missing the point of doing this with code.

Instead, using data means this block is a data source, called paultibbetts_dot_uk, which uses Cloudflare’s cloudflare_zone module to get a zone (domain) with a name of paultibbetts.uk.

I don’t know or care what the ID is and I can automate the process of finding it out.

resource "cloudflare_record" "microblog" {
  zone_id = data.cloudflare_zone.paultibbetts_dot_uk.id
  name    = "micro"
  type    = "CNAME"
  value   = "paultibbetts.micro.blog"
  ttl     = 300
}

When I create a cloudflare_record resource, called microblog, I can use the data source to get the ID of the zone for which domain the CNAME record should be added to.

vars.tf

variable "cloudflare_api_token" {
  type        = string
  description = "api token"
}

Because I don’t want to write down my API token in my code I set it up as a variable.

I can now pass in the token when I run Terraform:

terraform apply \ 
-var cloudflare_api_token="********" \ 

but I prefer loading it in as an environment variable.

You can do this by prefixing the variable with TF_VAR:

# secrets.sh
export TF_VAR_cloudflare_api_token=********

and remembering to source this file before you run Terraform commands

source secrets.sh
terraform apply

apply

Now I can run terraform apply, confirm the proposed changes, and Terraform will use the Cloudlfare API to add the CNAME to my domain for me.

After making a quick change in Micro.blog I’m live at my own domain 🥳

Sabbatical

I’m currently on a three month sabbatical from work.

I’ve been there for over five years and wanted a little break to work on my own things.

Personal

Touch typing - I’m learning to touch type. You’ll see me post about typing and keyboards more than I normally would.

Setting up my Mac - I’ve just bought an M3 Macbook Pro and I’m reviewing the apps I use.

Blogging - regularly. I’m viewing this as a project because it’s new to me, but I’d like it to become a normal everyday thing.

Getting back into fitness - running and cycling

Hobbies

Bikepacking - I bought a gravel bike to go bikepacking last year and I still haven’t been! I need to fix that.

Hiking - I’m always thinking about the next destination

Gaming

Helldivers 2 - for co-op

The Finals - for competitive PVP

Dave the Diver - for relaxing

Projects

Dev

Recommend.li - over seven years ago my colleagues and I wanted an app to send recommendations to each other, and we still haven’t found the right one, so now we’re making it ourselves.

Learning Go - because it looks better suited for the DevOps work I do nowadays.

Ops

Homelab - now I’ve got dedicated time to work on it I’m making more progress on my homelab than I have since I started it.

Reading

Non-fiction

Deep Work - I read this years ago and taking some time off to get some work done seemed like a perfect time to reread it.

DevOps Handbook - I really like this. I got to the part about “starting a DevOps movement in your company” and then started my sabbatical, so for now I’m reading the other books. I’ll finish it before I go back to work.

The Art of Monitoring - is helping to unravel the mysteries of monitoring web applications.

Fiction

Arisen Raiders: The Last Raid 🧟 - I don’t like the look of that title!

Blog

I’ve recently signed up to Micro.blog and it has a lot more features than my previous blog, so for now it’s my home on the internet.

I’m planning on using it for general updates and photos of bread of course, like any good blog, but also for recording design decisions in my development work, updates to my homelab and other nerdy things.

I’d like to make some progress on my own blogging system, and then these things can go there instead, but I don’t have that yet, so I’ll use Micro.blog to track my progress working towards that.