Podman not because of security but because of quadlets (systemd integration). Makes setting up and managing container services a breeze.

But check that it has all the features you need because it lags behind gitea in some aspects (like ci).

Podman quadlets have been a blessing. They basically let you manage containers as if they were simple services. You just plop a container unit file in /etc/containers/systemd/, daemon-reload and presto, you’ve got a service that other containers or services can depend on.

I’ve been in love with the concept of ansible since I discovered it almost a decade ago, but I still hate how verbose it is, and how cumbersome the yaml based DSL is. You can have a role that basically does the job of 3 lines of bash and it’ll need 3 yaml files in 4 directories.

About 3 years ago I wrote a big ansible playbook that would fully configure my home server, desktop and laptop from a minimal arch install. Then I used said playbook for my laptop and server.

I just got a new laptop and went to look at the playbook but realised it probably needs to be updated in a few places. I got feelings of dread thinking about reading all that yaml and updating it.

So instead I’m just gonna rewrite everything in simple python with a few helper functions. The few roles I rewrote are already so much cleaner and shorter. Should be way faster and more user friendly and maintainable.

I’ll keep ansible for actual deployments.

Someone found a way to weaponise bikeshedding.

Just have NAS A send a rocket with the data to NAS B.

Yeah OpenCASCADE is amazing because it’s the only real geometry kernel that’s open source. There’s a few smaller ones like solvespace, but they’re really more like toys. It’s like the Linux of the CAD world.

Writing a geometry kernel is a monumental task, not unlike writing a real os kernel or a modern web engine. I’ve seen people just lay the basic foundations of a kernel as their PhD thesis. Most of the commercial ones were written decades ago and are still being worked on - the big ones are Parasolid ACIS, ShapeManager, CGM. The last one would maybe be considered a newcomer cause it’s only 15-20 years old.