Josh Perry - Curiously Nerdy

Gitub+GCP Identity Federation with Config Connector

I was recently needing to access GCP resources from a github actions workflow in order to run an end-to-end test of gcp-kms-issuer. The old way of doing this would be

People, not machines, drive the craft

One of my favorite things in the world is a thought provoking book, and there's not much I enjoy doing more on a lazy Saturday than wandering the aisles of

Composing and Diffing Your GitOps Repo

In a recent post I opined on a past gitops failure and contemplated how showing diffs of the changes you're going to make to the running repo is one check

GPT4-created Kubernetes Policies

Like I mentioned in my previous LLM+k8s post, I've been curious about how we can bring the power of LLMs to bear in generating k8s resources from their knowledge

How to Delete Your GCP Org in One Easy Step With GitOps

OK, not the whole org but all of its permissions, which will usually end up being almost the same. At my last job I was helping a small company with

GCP KMS cert-manager Issuer

In my current project, the PKI heirarchy I want to create needs to be dynamic as automated and agile certificate topologies bring a lot of value to the defensive security

fly puts the bus in reverse and backs over NATS

In a recent post on their blog, fly talks about how they finally hit a scale where they couldn't fit every user's wireguard peer in their regional gateway node's kernels

LLM-Powered Embodied Lifelong Learning SysOp

I'm going to spend the next couple kilowords talking about how I view an LLM model's view of the world, and how we might map the LLM's conceptual-space to concept-first

NixOS + SteamVR + OpenXR + Godot

I'm in love with VR and with nix. I want to do my godot and other VR dev in Linux with the ability to easily share the output. SteamVR itself

The Atlantic-Sized Hole between docker and k8s

One place where I've been really unhappy with the UX of modern container-based SDLC pipelines is the creation of the images themselves. Docker was a disruptor, they were first to bring a (mostly) effective UX to the concept of "containers". But it hasn't kept

fly.io replaces Nomad with NIH

The newtech, selfhosted, cloud, IaaS provider fly.io released a blog post [https://fly.io/blog/carving-the-scheduler-out-of-our-orchestrator] last month detailing the escapade. I came upon this post as I've been recently looking through the landscape of [I|P]aaS providers. I'm simple, when I

Why Kubernetes is the Linux of the Future

I wrote a large diatribe attempting to extol the virtues of kubernetes in an internal document, trying to sell it off as the perfect abstraction layer. The Linux kernel itself

Addicted to Kubernetes

I've spent the last year working at my current gig with a talented team to make a huge move from onprem kvm virtual machines and puppet, to containers and kubernetes deployed to an onprem cloud. Before that I spent the better part of a

Software Development

Deconstructing a Static XModem Encrypted Bootloader

This was an on-paper design I used to verify the data access patterns of a hardware bootloader that could write updates to chip config and flash from an encrypted payload using a hardware-protected AES PSK, all clocked by xmodem frames. There are formal verification

Sysop

Piloting RabbitMQ with Kubernetes

NB: This is an old post. This general method of operating rabbit in kubernetes is still viable, but there are probably better ways to handle it these days. The in-house

Software Development

Persist Values in React with Custom Hooks

I needed to persist simple settings into localStorage in some react code, but the value of these settings were driven by a reducer. Composing a reducer and an effect hook

Software Development

Simple Function Three Ways

I've been spending some free time refactoring an OSS project I took over when the original dev sold the Chrome store app to a malware company; users have been asking

Sysop

Install Customized VIM from Source on Debian/Ubuntu

I am frequently using vim features that are not built into the default distro builds, and so I find it easiest to just build and install it from scratch to

Sysop

Configuring gpg-agent for SSH Authentication on Ubuntu

Since gpg-agent isn't used for ssh authentication on Ubuntu, and there are indeed 2 different daemons vying for the job, it can get complicated to figure out how to untangle

Using ssh-copy-id with Username and Password

Adding your private key fingerprint to ~/.ssh/authorized_keys is usually one of the first things you do with new Linux boxen. ssh-copy-id is meant to make that task easy by internally using ssh to automatically add the fingerprint for your default or a

Finder, Open iTerm Here

I used to be a windows junky and one command that I often used was the "Open command window here". It's a quick and easy way to start hacking on

Software Development

Node.js Encrypted Lantronix XPort Comms

The Lantronix XPort [https://www.lantronix.com/products/xport/] is a popular embedded "device server" which is effectively an ethernet card for microcontrollers. It provides transparent ethernet connectivity to a

Caseless identifier case strategy

If you've ever written software or enjoy dabbling in the inspect right-click option, you have seen these. In most structured computer languages, whitespace is important. Not necessarily important as in

Responsive Breakpoints and You

When I'm working with responsive layouts, it helps me to have a quick reference or two nearby to help jog my memory. This is a cheat that I have printed out and tape to my monitor for when I'm bootstrapping, to remind me which

Synology Password Today

Today's root password for Synology devices is This password is calculated on-the-fly, using a naive encoding based simply on the date. Here I've ported code from the Synology source repo