It has more than a decade since I last built a computer. In that time a lot has changed and a lot has stayed the same. Last time I build a computer it involved spending a couple hours searching catalogs online for parts and then eventually going to Fry’s Electronics to try to find the parts or equivalent within budget. Today it is so much easier to plan your build and be confident that the parts that you picked will not only be compatible but also fit using PCPartPicker.

Recently I had an issue where Terraform did not seem to be loading the correct provider. I was getting the following result from a terraform init -upgrade even though I had updated the provider name in versions.tf 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 Warning: Additional provider information from registry The remote registry returned warnings for registry.terraform.io/terraform-providers/cloudflare: - For users on Terraform 0.13 or greater, this provider has moved to cloudflare/cloudflare.

Every year in California the fire season feels like it gets longer and more devastating. This year with everything else going on it feels especially bad. This year I took the time to build a ingestion script of PurpleAir sensor data, graph it with Grafana and send alerts when the air near my apartment reaches >50 AQI. To build this I used PurpleAir’s API to pull sensor data every ~5 minutes and write it to MySQL.

I bought a new bike. It took me months of research, but I finally pulled the trigger on the Trek Allant+ 8s. The plan is to use this e-bike to commute to and from work and around the city. When I was in college I didn’t own a car and hated to drive (I still do). I didn’t get my drivers license until I was 18 and then didn’t drive again for almost 5 years.

Air filters in the classroom can potentially improve test scores as much as cutting class sizes by a third. This would be a huge win for relatively cheap. I wonder what happens in the long term.

Something I have thought about many times, but I would still need to have Windows/MacOS around for Lightroom or other photo editing software.

The best Taco Bell in the world just got better

Burnout seems to be a fact of life if you are working as a software engineer. I have been burned out before and it sucks. The biggest thing for me was making sure I take time for myself and make sure I do something I enjoy like photography or watching This Old House.