I’m a hacker at heart, I always have been. And today I’m realizing how much this is tainting my ability to watch other streams and videos from people in the IT world who are focused on cloud IT stuff and “infrastructure as code”.
I see myself in them sometimes, the part of me that wants to prepare people for work in the enterprise, to be empowered by full-time employment to do other things that matter far more. I asked my manager where all the other TEK Systems people were and most of them are doing SRE work and Terraform.
But mostly I realize that being a hacker means that if something is just irrelevant architecture for what I want to accomplish that I can hack it to do what I want without guilt, that I can abandon it and invent something that is better. That’s the power of having my own homelab, having a lot of experience, and having Go coding skills mastered (for anyone). It’s the only reason that I code, at all. I don’t enjoy coding. I enjoy making things better than what already exist.
What does this have to do with my homelab?
It means that my homelab is what I want, not what my company (or any company) would want. And I would waste time putting into some cloud service somewhere, where everything is at the whims of people making decisions in their interests and not mine. My homelab is where I can use technologies that I absolutely love, that I want to improve and learn, no matter what the use of those technologies outside of my homelab. And my homelab, after all, is for learning new things, practicing things that I do need for the job of my dreams, and for hacking the shit out of people for fun and profit.
This means that things like Terraform and Ansible and Vagrant are just completely unnecessary when ssh certs and a good bash script will do what I need. In fact, that is more of the hacker’s way to do it anyway. Being a hacker means using the least amount of unnecessary technology, making do with what you have, and when you don’t have something, making your own single binary root kit that you can install with a backdoor and have it do anything you want. That’s what I mean by approaching my homelab and everything I do off the work clock as a hacker would. I don’t need to fucking apologize to myself or anyone else for making the simpler decision, for not using Red Hat, for not using Ansible, for not creating wasteful VMs for everything and just using hardware that I keep managed myself in a way that is far simpler and more efficient than any of the “standard” ways.