Blog

A deep dive into my home grown cocktail recipe app which speaks Tailscale natively using tsnet, and serves up delicious drinks direct to your tailnet. Libations is built with Go, Nix and Vanilla Framework.

An extended “uses” post that outlines the hardware I’m currently using, the software and tools that I use to get things done, and how I configure things.

An overview of Multipass and LXD, and how I use them for creating, managing and enjoying virtual machines on my workstations and servers. I use Multipass for creating ‘headless’ development machines, and I break out to LXD for more complex scenarios like booting and testing desktop distributions.

A walkthrough of a simple release & CI tracking system I built for keeping track of the various teams I manage at Canonical using a small Go application, Hugo and Github Actions

An explanation of how to enable secure boot on NixOS, using a community project named ‘Lanzaboote’, and further how to automatically unlock a LUKS-encrypted disk using a TPM with systemd-cryptenroll.

The community-led organisation Snapcrafters maintains hundreds of Snap packages, with hundreds of thousands of users. This post looks at an upgraded test/release process with automated screenshotting of GUI apps, and a new Github Actions based workflow.

The homepage-dashboard NixOS service previously enabled the deployment of the wonderful homepage dashboard, but its configuration was not handled natively in Nix by the module. This post shows how I added support for native configuration, and how you can migrate.

A follow on from my last post, outlining the process of upstreaming Scrutiny to nixpkgs to make it easier to consume, and have it included in future NixOS releases.

A detailed walkthrough how I packaged Scrutiny, a S.M.A.R.T disk monitoring tool, for NixOS. Includes details of creating a NixOS module and using the NixOS testing framework to validate its functionality.

A write up of how I boot KVM accelerated NixOS VMs on Github Actions runners in order to run end-to-end tests for my packages.

Documenting how I render, serve, build and deploy my personal website and blog using a combination of Go, Hugo, Nix and Fly.io.

(Repost) A write-up of my adventures with Parca, and building a Snap package, as well as a set of charms for driving Parca and profiling applications run with Juju on machines and Kubernetes.

(Repost) Building a zero-trust, serverless authentication system for SSH on Microsoft Azure, complete with custom ssh-agent and serverless certificate authority.