My Technology Stacks

Programming

You can find a lot of the tools I use for programming via my repo JennToo/no-place-like-home.

• I use Ansible to automatically provision my own development environment, as well as managing servers at home and at work. It's a very useful tool for ensuring a consistent state across multiple machines. It also means I can very quickly provision a new development environment.
• My preferred text editor is Neovim. It's easy to use, even over SSH.
  • And Neovim is way faster than Emacs. I used Emacs for about 12 years, but eventually it got too slow and was really making my development time inefficient. I do miss it sometimes, especially the Lisp elements.
  • Sometimes I will use VS Code, but I find it usually wants way too much RAM and CPU for what it's doing. And I also prefer entirely keyboard driven programs while programming.
• I'm proficient in a number of programming languages, but there are two that I reach for the most often.
  • I use Python by default. Most of my work doesn't require high runtime efficiency. Since I'm usually developing tools and CI infrastructure, the ability to glue disparate systems together quickly is my main priority. And Python is great for that. 💖🐍
  • When I need resource efficiency, I'll use Rust. It works well on embedded targets and for systems that need better performance than what Python can offer. I wrote my Game Boy emulator in Rust.
  • I'm also proficient with these languages, but they're not my first choices for new projects:
    • C++ is fine, but not something I'll choose for a new project. The language is a bit of a mess, with so many wrong ways to do something. The tooling is also generally bad, except GDB which is great!
    • I admire C for its simplicity, but I wouldn't use it on anything bigger than a toy project if I could help it.
    • Groovy is not a good language at all. But since I write a lot of Jenkins CI pipelines at work, that involves writing a lot of Groovy 😭
    • Various Lisps are cool! Being homoiconic is neat, especially when combined with macros. I also think the model of "live" programming is interesting, though I never really wrapped my head around it.
• For static website development I use Pelican. It's a Python based site generator. It turns Jinja templates and Markdown / reStructuredText files and turns them into webpages.
  • This website is made in Pelican!
  • I also use Pelican for maintaining the website for our support group.
  • I'm a big fan of static websites with no backends, and very little Javascript. I think most content on the web is served just fine by static text on a page, laid out with some simple CSS.
• I'm also a fan of poetry for Python dependency management! Luckily, in the intervening time since I wrote that blogpost the wider Python ecosystem really seemed to adopt poetry quite heavily.

Home Services

I don't like cloud-based and subscription-based online services. Where those things can be avoided, I will do so. To that end I host a lot of services just at my house on a server, which itself is just an old repurposed desktop computer.

The files configuring most of my services can be found in my home-services repository

• I use Jellyfin for hosting music and video content that I rip from disks (physical-media4life!). It has an interface very similar to video streaming services.
  • For mobile access to music, I use Finamp to connect back to Jellyfin. Its interface works very well on a phone, and looks more like a standard music streaming system.
• For basic home automation I use Home Assistant. I don't have many IoT devices, and to the capacity that I can I try and keep all of their network traffic within my own network. I have a few smart switches that I use to control fans and 3d printers, and that's about it. Home Assistant works great for that. There's a lot of fancy things that it can do too that I've never really explored. Maybe someday!
  • I mainly use this to control the fan pointed at my bed while I sleep. At night I can get too warm, so I like the fan on. But by the time I wake up I don't want to get out of bed since it's too cold! 🥶 But with a smart plug, I can use my phone to turn the fan off. Otherwise I'll stay in the warm and cozy bed too long.
• Dokuwiki is a very simple wiki system where I keep my notes. It's a little janky, but it works well enough.
• I follow RSS feeds using FreshRSS. It works well enough. Not fancy at all, just gets the job done.
  • I think when Google killed off Google Reader that's when my disdain for cloud hosted services really began 😡
• nginx combined with some DNS records makes it easy to access all the internal services by name. Instead of trying to remember port numbers for everything.
• All of the services I mentioned above are launched with Docker. Because nobody has time to be trying to figure out how to install all the crazy dependencies each of these services have 😂
• For storage, I have a triplet of hard drives configured with ZFS. I like ZFS a lot! In particular I like that it does frequent validation of the stored data. It also makes backups to an external drive very easy.
• I don't trust most of these services being exposed directly to the Internet, so when I need to access things remotely I use Wireguard for VPN. It works well once you have it setup. It's way easier to setup than OpenVPN.

The Cloud is just someone else's computer.