Posts

Declarative approach to setting up my Macbook workstation So I have the habit of wiping my machine every 3-12 months (Pretty subjective window 🤷) and I usually don’t have a hard time getting my workstation up and running again in an hour. I use chezmoi for my dotfiles configurations, homebrew for my package manager and oh-my-zsh + starship for my terminal prompt. Ansible is a fine tool to automate this process, but it feels a bit clunky running a playbook against macOS. This is where nix-darwin saves the day (or, well, a hour of my time). Creating one Nix flake allows me to declaratively install the packages—CLI and GUI—onto my machine with a simple rebuild command. It also keeps my machine clean by ensuring I don’t have any lingering packages I forgot to delete when testing them out 😁 ...

Putting the old repo to rest 💀 I had this repo that hosted a role that would bootstrap servers with the good stuff: a default sudo user with a few packages and ssh configs. Mainly used in my homelab or testing things out in a VPS. It’s been years since I made any real changes, and it was a pain in the ass to keep up to date with the packages. Instead of painstakingly upgrading pip packages with constant breaking changes, I decided to start over with an Ansible collection. ...