My biggest problem in writing about tech is tech

As part of my New Year resolutions, I want to post some content to this blog daily. But as I sit here (on the toilet no less) with 16 minutes to midnight, I have found today to be a difficult day to write about the work I wanted to do because of the work I had to do. So enjoy this stream of conscience post.

In my infinite wisdom, I recently decided to reinstall my main OS on my personal laptop. While this is fine since I only ever use a limited number of apps making setup theoretically quick, I also decided to write an Ansible playbook to do all the hard work automatically and idepotemptly. The problem with that is now the simple act of apt install, brew install, and curl is no longer so simple. I have to write, test, and modify plays and tasks to get what I need done which often involve several steps more than the command line.

And while the benefits of using Ansible (e.g., saving several text files in a VCS rather than a whole OS image) and IaC as a whole are fairly clear to me, for a personal side project, I have found that it gets in the way of what I really want to do. Yeah, I could've just used my bash scripts as before, or even just keep a text file of the software that I had installed along with their configs, but where is the fun in that? What do I learn by sticking to what I know versus exploring a new technology? Isn't that what I want to write about?

And if it is, then why is it so hard to actually write about it? Ansible IMO, is cool technology and should be adopted by just about everyone, but actually trying to write about it is tough. Yesterday I put out a quick post about a Tailscale play I wrote (which is still cool and definitely worth the read), but I don't want to be known as the "Ansible" bro online. I wanted to write about colors today and even write a little tool to translate "human" color codes (i.e., red, blue, green) into ANSI codes. But because of the technology decisions I made, and the stack that I chose, I have found myself bogged down in system configuration minutia that I did not want to be in.

I think I'm just rambling now. It's currently 11:55 PM where I am and I need to get some sleep. Here's a picture of my cat Bennie for reading this stream of thought. Thanks. Here's to tomorrow (which is now 1 minute away).