I've completed the RedHat Cloud Automation coursework. Red Hat's training material is excellent and even though the lab environment was a bit wonky it was otherwise very nice. Took around 80 hours total (no skipping and a lot of note taking).
Blog
Short musings from a Linux and Web guy
And so, I setup ansible as a main tool to work on my personal servers. It's great, it doesn't mind working on a mixed set of distributions and server stacks.
At work, we use mostly RedHat and SuSE. While they're rock solid and really good for servers, they tend to be less polished for Workstation/Desktop use. So, for my personal use I kept to Ubuntu-based distros (mainly due to the large user base and available packages).
However, I like to tinker and frequently check out different Linux distributions to keep a wider skillset. So I migrated to Fedora for a while, and spent a couple of months using it as my main driver. It's pretty good and while its supposed to be RedHat's playground it doesn't feel like it.
I've been meaning to build something like LFS but there's a big issue with integrating a package manager, so I did the traditional manual install of Arch Linux to give it a shot. I also decided to go back to Awesome WM + Mate desktop apps and services.
So far, so good.
I've redesigned my site for a cleaner look and faster loading. I've also fixed some compatibility issues and minor viewport bugs on IE.
I took a long look at several new minimalistic CSS frameworks, and even though I like the idea, most of them leave out older browser compatibility due to taking advantage of new CSS properties. This tradeoff makes them very clean, but centered around mostly webkit based browsers. I also dislike deeply the idea of installing them through the nodejs toolchain, since its prone to breakage and overengineering.
Clean code for clean designs.
Here's my current setup.
Hardware:
- Lenovo Thinkpad t540p
Software:
- KDE Neon
- Firefox Nightly
- Spacemacs / Kate
- Yakuake
- OpenVPN
- Apache/NGINX
- Arc/Solarized Color Scheme
Site Redesign mostly complete. I've generated a Gource video file to visualize development.