GNU Make has been around for an awfully long time, and I’ve recently starting reverting back to it because I’ve been doing a lot of terraform. It’s still incredibly useful even though I’m not actually building anything locally. I hadn’t really thought about make for a long time (since not writing any C in anger), and I’ve forgotten everything that I ever knew about make. It’s a bit like riding a bike though, you’re not better than the next person, but what you are is just quicker at constructing the right search term and understanding the results because you have the memory trigger from a different era.

CodeQL is the successor to LGTM; I was hoping for a seamless transition to CodeQL, but sadly that wasn’t to be. A lot of the things that I had been previously been doing like @SuppressWarnings("lgtm[ignore-this-weak-crypto]") were being ignored, and I’ve been ignoring the security code scanning alerts as well. It’s taken a while, but now I’ve actually embarked on a journey where I am in the process of using it for some additional projects and I wanted to make sure that I have the feature set that I’m used to :- being able to suppress alerts in the code, not in an external tool. This is important because the code will always exist for the lifetime of the product but tools come and go.

I’m running kubernetes at home; it seemed like an amusing thing to do at the time. I have been using helm charts to install the things. As helm charts are updated then the underlying docker images are updated; so as a downstream consumer of the helm charts I just have to worry about whether the helm chart maintainer has lost interest / abandoned the charts. The charts from k8s-at-home have been archived in github which means they are effectively abandoned. Consequently I decided to migrate to terraform to manage my kubernetes infrastructure at least for those charts.

I now have to concern myself with when third-party docker images are updated and published.

Recently I’ve started using the gradle axion-release plugin; it’s a nice idea since I agree with its core precepts. It means that I don’t have to think about what the next version number will be since that is now derivable from git history. This post isn’t about that though, it’s about gradle plugin dependency management and the rabbit hole I found myself in.

You know what they say, you can always run Linux on your old hardware to make it useful again. I have a Mac Mini, more specifically a Apple Inc. Macmini7,1/Mac circa 2015/2016 whose usefulness is now at an end. It’s worth pointing out here that I don’t think this particular Mac was actually ever any good as a long term piece of kit; soldered RAM and having to break out my torx screw driver set never equates to fun times in my book. Still, it should be fine with Linux running on it, being a spare Kubernetes node in my homelab…