It’s been over a year since I wrote anything on here. I apparently wrote something a year ago I never published, and the last before that was in July 2022. Over a year that I’ve been out of training, a fully qualified C-130 pilot. Doing pilot things.
Over a year since I spent any significant amount of time on coding, on systems administration, on anything tech, really. I’ve been drowning in work, in family matters, in attempts at businesses. Everything feels cosmic, new, unfathomable. I love flying (well, some of flying, but that’s for another day), but digging through publications to find answers to quiz sheets made several years ago based off of other, now-defunct publications is excruciating. Trying to understand the politics and dynamics of a military unit (and the military as a whole) is exhausting and potentially impossible. Helping my wife navigating struggles with mental health and relearn how to adult is baffling.
The last few weeks I’ve been away from home for work. I’m doing important things, but I have a lot of free time on my hands. A couple weeks ago I got sick of problems with Nextcloud and started looking at alternatives. I found one, but needed a calendar server. (I promise there’s a point to this) Turns out, none of the open-source CalDAV servers do what I want them to do. My brother suggested we build on. Then we looked into it. The number of RFCs relevant to CalDav is in the dozens. The pages is in the thousands. I dug right in and read several hundred pages in a couple of days.
The last few days I had a similar last-straw experience with my server cluster. Long story that isn’t completely the cluster’s fault including the storage being accessible only over wifi, but I moved my servers to run on the virtual machine on my desktop that held the storage. Anyway, the point being that I suddenly had to do a bunch of work on servers and also had a TON of resources available to host more stuff. So I did some looking and some testing.
Here’s the thing: it was like coming home. I don’t get office politics or what that look or interaction from that leader means, but I GET implementation specifications for WebDAV. I understand that. I can build mental maps that hold that information as easily as a fish drinks water. I LOVE playing with servers. Yeah, it’s frustrating when I have to deal with poor documentation, but I repeatedly found myself noting where the developer was using copy/paste documentation that didn’t make sense for that they were doing (yeah, I’ll go make some pull requests).
I got my RSS server back online today (storage-over-wifi leads to really bad write corruption due to power fluctuations and weird hardware), and pulled up a blog post by /dev/lawyer about terminology. And I understood it. Today I sat through a briefing full of acronyms and concepts I still don’t understand after 2 years of being immersed in it. But I understood the terminology discussions, the uses, the implications. I even somewhat understood the politics and interactions that drive and are driven by that terminology.
I feel like a fish coming back to the rivers I was born in. It’s so comfortable. I didn’t even know I was missing it, but it’s good to be back.