"He didn't post since 2021... Will he be back?"

Table of Contents

It’s been a while since I wrote anything. In 2021, I had committed to finishing the 100 Days To Offload challenge and stopped writing after the 18th post. Two days ago, it hit me that I had not written anything since February 2021. As anyone wanting to start/revive their blog, I started an intense procrastination upgrading Hugo, trying themes, figuring out how to upgrade Plausible and seeing that Full Disk Encryption with Proxmox and ZFS was probably my most popular post.

Then, still with no post in sight, I did a round of blog reading, ended up on Hyde’s blogroll and saw the following:

Screenshot of https://lazybear.io/blogroll, where Hyde lists my blog as not updated in a while with the mention: “He didn’t post since 2021… Will he be back?

A few things that happened since my last post:

Life #

After 6 years in Berlin, my German is still not up to the task, but I’m making steady progress.
I picked up running at the end of 2023 and then ran the Berlin Halbmarathon in April 2024 in 2 hours and 3 minutes. Unfortunately, I hurt my foot during the preparation and am currently recovering before getting back in my running shoes.

Conferences #

I went to SREcon, PromCon and KubeCon for the first time!
I spoke at SREcon 2023 EMEA:
I also gave a lightning talk at PromCon 2023:

Open-source #

I helped the prometheus-operator project by submitting a proposal for the ScrapeConfig CRD and providing a first implementation, then becoming a maintainer for the project.

Infrastructure / Lab / Software #

Out of my procrastination, this blog now uses the great Congo theme. I’m not set on anything yet and will certainly spend more time playing with it.
I went back to the Apple ecosystem with the release of the Macbook Air M2.
I saw the light and started using Tailscale, which is a wonderful piece of technology.
LogSeq became a very important tool in my daily routine, which probably deserves its own post.
I’ve put the EdgeRouter 4 I used in Wireguard on your Edgerouter to rest and replaced it with a Cloud Gateway Ultra.
And other things that I’ll detail in a follow-up post.

Work #

I’m still working for Sony Interactive Entertainment, now as a Principal SRE with a big focus on Observability.
Lately, I organized an internal conference, gathering close to 500 people in the company over 24h, which was an awesome and rewarding experience.

Is he back? #

To answer Hyde’s question, I’m not sure whether I’m back, but just writing this post gave me a ton of ideas. Maybe more posts in 2024?