I use Gitlab at home for a bevy of personal things, and find the built-in CI really handy for further automating changes to my network. Now that I'm trying to spend time away from the desk that I use for Working from Home, I'm using my iPad a lot. If I'm doing something like making some DNS changes in my Gitlab-managed zone files, I don't want to have to context-switch out of my lovely full-screen terminal to a web browser to check if the changes have finished deploying.
Yesterday evening I hacked up something to check the status of a given gitlab org/repo.
This morning I added a second script to wait until the pipeline has “finished”, and print a useful message:
% gitlab-ci-status -v
success for some-org/local-dns in 26 seconds at Sun 12 Jul 2020 10:14:22 AEST
Being a one-night-and-one-morning invention I've taken a few liberties that I'll try and resolve over time:
I didn't test it anywhere other than Linux yet (and I used GNU date somewhere as a quick/lazy solution to something).
You can imagine that I haven't tested too much beyond the “happy path”.
Later on I'll hook it up to either:
tell Emacs to tell me it's done, or
some kind of push notification thingo. (done: see the -n option.)
The first part of this I remember writing a very simple version for, for one particular Jenkins pipeline I worked on a lot, back in the days when I was still a sysadmin in my day job. Now, I just do this for fun.
Walking remains a key part of my mental health regime. After a week stuck in a small room at home on innumerable Zoom calls, I need the peace and quite of the changing ground under my feet, and some music in my ears. I don't need to go far – my immediate surroundings change constantly, and there's always little things to notice. Late last year, a building that seemed like it would never change (having remained the same for over a decade) was suddenly emptied of the detritus out front, and demolished:
I wasn't early enough to enjoy the morning fog, but what a crisp morning! I braved a street I once lived in (some memories are harder than others), and pushed further west into some streets I rarely visit anymore, full of the usual mix of terrifying mansion-like things amongst the preserved prior world.
There are tiny hints amongst the blankness – subtle things, not the wall-high scrawls – I appreciate the little notes.
Remnants of another milk bar that succumbed to the ravages of our times, though I struggle to remember the particular nature of this one.
Really, it's just nice to be out, seeing nothing in particular.
Musical accompaniment was something new (competely unheard) and something old (but not listened to for a long time):
Do I suddenly have more to say? Not in particular, but in the process of cleaning up lots of old things and old memories, I realised that I missed feeling part of a world of words. Like everyone, I fell into the world of short status updates and private messaging (the latter not so different to the 90s, except that this time we don't have a single app pulling all the chat protocols together). My ability to self-host never went away, but convenience trumped continuing to maintain my own software stack as my day job moved away from hands-on tech, and also as my life changed in various unexpected ways.
For various reasons, now feels like a time that I'm able to consider revisiting this world. I wonder how many old friends are still out there?
