I think that “modern” shrink-wrapped software (Helm Charts) is like fast food. It takes only a couple of seconds to eat (deploy), but isn’t a long-term healthy thing to do.
Not all Helm Charts are like this. I’m specifically talking about any Helm Chart that’s big enough to include other Helm Charts. I’m going to pick on Wordpress as the example in this blog post.
Why Are Helm Charts Fast Food, Exactly?
Imagine you are working on developing a new product for your customers. Your customers have some feature requirements, so you write them down in a chart:
Customer Foo Feature plugh Support quux Frobulator xyzzy Viewer Customer A ☑️ Customer B ☑️ ☑️ ☑️ Customer C ☑️ ☑️ ☑️ Customer D ☑️ ☑️ Awesome! You certainly want to know what your customers actually need before working on your product!
Which feature(s) should you start on first?
Normally when searching for a new home, one picks a city & budget, and then a real estate agent would find some homes for you to look at.
But what if instead, you could make a computer program do the home searching for you?
What if you could stretch out your home search across space and time? Instead of focusing on one area your real estate agent knows about for a month or so, what if you could search everywhere for many months?
Inspired by comments of a “forever desktop” here, analogous to a “forever home”, I wanted to share some thoughts on my “forever desktop”.
(What year is it again?)
The exact software that powers my desktop will inevitably change, but my principles won’t.
(But if you are asking, it is Regolith, which is an opinionated i3 setup combined with gnome desktop services.)
The Evolution of Desktop Environments I’m old enough to have experienced the transition from MS-DOS onward, and there is a reason GUI interfaces won: ease of use.
I’ve previously written an ode to the Palm PVG-100 as my favorite phone of all time.
It still is, but recently Google decided to end support for Android Auto for older phones (Android 8).
Android Auto is a personal requirement of mine, and I couldn’t find any way to stick to an old version.
So I embarked on the difficult journey of upgrading Android on this tiny phone from Android 8.
I love watching my favorite channels on Youtube. There is such great content out there, and with Patreon, there can be niche channels that I love where the content creators can just do what they love, and I can watch! I’m happy to pay them money directly.
But I don’t really like Youtube.com (the platform) exactly. They have other priorities (ads, engagement, enshitification). In the end, I want to watch a video.
Intro Ever since Microsoft acquired Github in 2018, I’ve been thinking of migrating away from Github.
It’s not about Microsoft being more or less evil than Github; it’s just the way things go sometimes where a parent company must use an acquired company for leverage.
But to where?
Where could I move my code to that also isn’t another company waiting to enshitify its service?
Then I read about this still fake star nonsense and thought, yea, this is a silly place.
Mainframes In the beginning was the mainframe and time-sharing systems:
IT’s job was to protect the sacred mainframe. Time was money.
Users could humbly submit their stack of punch cards and wait for a response.
Would I have asked for time on one of these mainframes? Absolutely.
PCs The PC revolutionized computing in the enterprise:
Computing became more accessible. You could have your own computer at your desk!
IT’s job was to … maintain countless PCs.
I love my PVG100 Android Phone. I’m afraid that another phone like this might never exist, so I’m paying homage to it in blog post form.
Some stock photos:
The photos are real. This phone is real. There really isn’t anything like it, and you have to actually hold it in your hand to understand what a marvel it is.
You can still buy it new on Amazon right now, although I don’t recommend it.
Want to make this blog post more fun to read? Replace the placeholder system names with ones you are familiar with. Then share the updated URL with your friends, and it will retain those replacements—a personalized blog post just for you! Word for your old legacy system: Word for your new shiny system: Replace Reset TL;DR: Whenever doing a big migration from system to system2, front-load as much work as possible into building migration scaffolding to system2.