Quite a lot of countries, like the UK, Canada and India start their financial year only in March and not January. Karnataka, my birth state has its traditional new year usually occurring between March and April.

Come to think of it, March is an interesting time of the year to kick-start, or at least think about starting, a new page of a new year. In my opinion, this is when the commercialized tropes of New Year resolutions have all faded away by March, with none of your friends, family, society, or even your pet gorilla, chasing you about your new year resolutions. What is left is only the distilled form of what truly matters to you!

My resolutions are seemingly simple and not too taxing, in my opinion:

• Get my German Führerschein (driver's license) by the end of the year.
• Learn to swim, or at least diligently and earnestly try. The goal here is to enjoy swimming in a water source that is not too shallow but not too deep, without my fellow humans being concerned about my dear life.
• Update my blog 12 times a year, from March 2023 to March 2024. More on this below.
• Cook more often, since I am privileged to have a pretty nice kitchen. Also, my mother pestered me sufficiently to take a pressure cooker for rice with me on my way back to Germany. This thing makes it seriously easy to focus on the main dish rather than wonder about treating rice like a side dish.

I will update this blog at least 12 times per year. It will be trilingual, and the first draft post will be in English, as the impact of British colonialism still apparently lingers on in the language that I think in my head. (Or maybe it's because for the last 5 years in Germany, English has been the de-facto communication language until my German really picked up.) I will update the German and the Kannada slightly later, but by hand without using AI or Google Translate, in order to improve my fluency in these two languages.

I have made fervent attempt to blog previously. Once I got a hang of it, generally I really liked blogging. Since the monetary incentive of SEO blogging was taken away from me about 8 years ago since I switched to full time employment as a software engineer, my blogging died a slow death.

This is yet another attempt to resurrect it fully, this time around for no incentive, but rather for the sheer joy of it.

I have begun to experiment with Oracle Cloud Platform, mainly because I genuinely like how much free infra is available in the free tier. I like it quite a lot and will probably lean to that. I play with kubernetes quite a lot since the last 3 years and I figured it would be quite nice to have a personal K8s cluster handy, just in case. My current humble M1 Macbook air can do the job well with microk8s, however I do appreciate some added muscle and availability on the cloud ofc.

The nicest bit, as of writing this article is the 24 GB RAM that you receive apart from AMD instances that you get as well. I managed to se tup a nice little K8s cluster (albeit on a single node as of now) on the ampere instance, well under just 20 minutes. Most of it went around fiddling about OCI's interface and learning the differences from AWS's UI

I like that the VPC -> VCN concept mapping is quite relatively straight forward too. As of now, the most striking bit is the "Resource Manager" from Oracle, which gives you the full capability of using Terraform to apply infrastructure directly from OCI instead of using CloudFormation like you do in AWS. This is kind of a big deal as of now for me.

I have also used OCI's Bastion feature to directly tunnel without having to use a Public Subnet Bastion (NICE!). I need to figure out how do I safely tunnel k8s config directly in a way that I start a OCI bastion session from my local machine into the K0s cluster. That should be quite interesting..

I can blog from my phone! Such modern technology!

Sarcasm aside however, it’s still a bit cumbersome since I need to save the metadata in my bear notes before blogging and then painfully commit it via GitHubs mobile website. I will hopefully fix it tomorrow when my sleep-deprived-zombie-state is over by moving the metadata append to GitHub actions instead...

Sadly the iOS Github app doesn’t allow committing file OR viewing actions from it (!). This roughly translates into:

1. Write my immensely wise words of wisdom in Bear
2. Export -> copy md file from Bear
3. Paste it manually in GitHubs mobile unfriendly mobile site as a new commit...
4. Let a simple CI/CD pipeline via Github actions take care of publishing it

On the brighter side, I really admire Bear’s joy of use and might actually buy the subscription

Oh and it really supports tags such as this #blogpost

Trying out bear from the phone

Now that we have simple CD setup, time to try blogging from the iPhone!

About CloudFormation

This blog was hosted in Terraform previously and that worked almost fine for me. Almost: because somehow the setup felt a bit incohesive with the blogs Cloufront + S3 setup and for my day job I will be working a lot more with CloudFormation and I guess the blog is a good playing ground for expanding my domain knowledge of this. Over the next few days, the idea will be to migrate to a CDK/CF setup... because why not?!

Stay tuned

I will start professing great words of wisdom here... anytime now.