I’ve been hanging around the Internet since the days of UUCP connections. The distributed / less-centralized nature of those times is something that still appeals to me, which is why I’m still here #selfhosting and hosting for others – I’ve loved empowering friends to get their thoughts up and into the Internet so that it’s not just the same old nerds like me in here.

I’m trying out WriteFreely as a way to better aggregate my writing and some other information. This post serves as both an #introduction and a test.

what do I like to do?

A significant part of my brain seems to be filled with #music – lots of it. I used to try and blog about it long ago, but now I'd rather just keep listening than finding ever-more convoluted ways to describe it.

I love #walking, especially as a way to explore #FilmPhotography (or digital #photography). I’m not scared of #PublicTransport and quite like #trains.

My photography goes way back on Flickr, a little less further back on Instagram and I've more recently been experimenting with Pixelfed – see @cos@pixelfed.social or @cos@pixelfed.au. Either way, I try to find beauty in the everyday with my images. I'm particularly fascinated by blankness.

what do I care about?

The world's a better place when we don't feel we need to hide who we really are. To me, this means (among other things):

• Trans rights are human rights.
• Black lives matter.
• Human beings are not “illegal”.
• Love is love.
• People should have control over their own bodies.
• Science is real.
• Kindness is everything.

where can I be found on social media?

These days, the Fediverse is where it's at – you can find me at @cos@aus.social.

what do I do for work?

I spent a long time as a systems administrator, network engineer, systems engineer and otherwise, but these days I focus on the people aspects of #DevOps, #SRE or #PlatformEngineering by managing teams, growing people, and helping everyone understand that Software’s Not Just For Christmas. If you want to know more, you can read my LinkedIn Profile.

what's some other tech-related stuff that I'm interested in?

#emacs is not a dirty word. Given my change of work focus, I’d guess that 98% of my time in it nowadays is spent using #orgmode to keep notes on what’s going on at work.

Once upon a time, I helped some friends start a #Linux User Group called LUV. It's been a long time since I was involved, but I'm glad that it kept going for all these years – plenty of other people put in a lot of work to make it so, and more power to them! Despite that love for Linux, I've enthusiastically used other #Unix / Unix-like operating systems over the years too, and happily use a Mac desktop these days – it's all ok by me.

Yesterday evening I hacked up something to check the status of a given gitlab org/repo.

It started simple:

% gitlab-ci-status org/repo
running

[ ... time passes ... ]

% gitlab-ci-status org/repo
success

I quickly added support for:

• automagically guessing the org/repo from wherever you are (is there an “origin” remote? where does it point to? is it our gitlab server?).
• fetching the API token from gopass.

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.

I hope it's useful to somebody!

https://gitlab.com/ajcos/gitlab-ci-tools

#gitlab #shell #cli #ci #nerdery #linux

This was a post from Cos.

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