I ended up prototyping self hosted https://woodpecker-ci.org/ on my k8s cluster. Ended up taking just a few hours of AI time (Claude Code). Woodpecker has a helm chart, can connect to Github and post status checks to commits.
Open to feedback or tips and tricks on this, but so far it's looking promising. Curious how other folks experience has been.
This is one of the reasons I picked a small, dedicated email provider [1] over Google Workspace for my corporate emails. If Google flips out and ban hammers us for no reason, my company will still be able to reach clients and work on projects. Apple, Google and Facebook are way too trigger happy with automated bans and no recourse.
Prefixing this here with - this is just my experience, I’m sure everyone who’s gone down this rabbit hole has had a different experience.
I usually trawl Ebay for a little bit every day when I’m looking for something specific, and start making offers when I figure out exactly what I want. Negotiating with the seller, asking questions about things that are for “parts only”. I have built up a small but very useful set of contacts that liquidate a lot of large/medium tech co’s surplus through this, so shoot me a message (see profile) if you have some specific hardware in mind.
If you’re doing 100G ethernet, my advice, biased by personal experience, is to buy “old” Mellanox gear from before the Nvidia acquisition, but went through the phase of still being supported by Nvidia.
With NICs I’d avoid Connect-X 4, mostly due to their age, but 5 and 6 are great. There are so many models though so make sure you pick one that meets your needs, pay attention to the form factor especially - FHHL, HHHL, OCP 3, etc. Vendor OEM parts can often be cheaper - there’s a glut of HPE cables/transceivers, cards and switches out there, that are just Mellanox gear out there, or Supermicro AIOM cards that are fully OCP compliant. I’ve not had any issue mixing and matching this stuff.
For instance, I have a Gigabyte server with a couple Bergamo CPUs plugged into an HPE SN2700 switch with FS cables, Juniper transceivers, a Supermicro CX-6 OCP 100G card, and a non-OEM CX-6 dual port Infiniband CX-6 plugged into an QM8790 switch that looks like it’s been through through a rock tumbler and has a few ports that I’ve reattached with a pretty poor soldering job. Works flawlessly - literally the only issue I’ve had with it is losing the BMC password I set to the ether, and temporary jankiness with the 2700 after I accidentally force pushed the Mellanox update, instead of the HPE update. Still was able to update the firmware without going in to the datacenter.
I’ve had too many issues personally with Broadcom and their drivers to want to use them, but they are excellent if you put in the effort.
Never used the Intel 100G card, I was put off of trying by issues I had with their 10G stuff, though I think they are fully supported in the mainline kernel now.
The SN2100 can be found pretty cheap. The SN2700 is my fave, and they are actually pretty easy to repair (as long as the ASIC board isn’t the issue!). Sometimes you’ll find prototype networking equipment for some reason, but that stuff tends to work too. I first installed Debian on it after coming across an excellent article[0], since then I have also set up arch, and currently it’s running a seamless NixOS install (really the necessary kernel config was enabling switchdev and the MLX options like in the article). It’s basically just a 32 port NIC implemented mostly as an ASIC, with a small dual core Celeron server as a management peripheral ;) Just make sure you grab that RJ45 serial adapter! IIRC I think the Juniper-compatible ones work flawlessly with this.
I'm a night owl C-suite (CTO), but with all of my peers as you describe.
It's possible to make it work, you have to be very firm on your boundaries. One option that worked for me was to explain that I can effectively do more timezone coverage despite being in the same Geo-zone.
It also helped to showcase the work I do while they are offline, so when they wake up they see a column of work that has been bounced back across to their plate.
It is definitely hard though, and takes the right crowd who respects you enough to make it work.
It's probably impossible to do this as a CEO though.
The challenge that I face is Calibre absolutely craters after 20,000+ ebooks.
I understand that most folks probably have 10-300 books, but in my case I have some large libraries I tried to use with Calibre, and it just absolutely DIES.
The steadfast decision to exclusively use SQLite doesn't help. I opened a PR back in 2016 or so, but the maintainer was quite enthusiastically opposed to changing the DB layer or making it pluggable.
This is strange, Kovid Goyal, for all his apathy towards UI, is an excellent performance engineer. Check out his production terminal emulator kitty. He's more than capable of building extremely scalable systems. I would be surprised that this is a bottleneck caused by Calibre's core code.
He is however an asshole on the level of Linus when it comes to bug reports and community support.
This keeps getting parroted in every thread about Calibre, but Kovid is not an asshole when it comes to community support, it was more of a one time incident. Here is a comment I’m copying from a different HackerNews thread:
“ It's a big shame that whenever anything related to Calibre is posted, top comments will often be how arrogant is author is. I used to think the same. But when I read his comments history in GitHub, he doesn't seem a dick to me at all. So I googled his name, and end up in a forum. It completely changed my mind.
Contrary to what people believe, Dovid Goyal is the most friendly programmer to his users. He spent lots of time answering questions in the forum https://www.mobileread.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=166. His answers include where is a menu located, how to convert a book from one format to another, helping the user to debug the exact the problem with Calibre. He has been doing this daily and is very responsive. You can expect an answer to your question in the same day. (The forum used to allow you to read user's comments history anonymously, but now you need a account to do so)”
Those are two entirely different circumstances from which to start from and it’s inevitable they would have vastly divergent results even in the same hands.
What happens after 20K books? I am at about 13K books, and I haven't run into any issues yet. I make extensive use of virtual libraries in Calibre, and tags for organization.
Over 25,000 books. Still runs quite nicely even on a slower mini PC.
I suspect you are using a unusual use case like keeping the library on a fat32 drive.
I was able to set up fiber link aggregation with triple NICs and a custom VLAN and MTU with no issues. It supports bridges and child interfaces just fine.
I have been a long time customer of the enterprise version of Streamdal, and I can confidently say Daniel and Ustin are absolutely KILLER engineers. Any time we spoke I always was impressed by their super deep experience and understanding of modern challenges!
So good to see you getting some love on HN. Excited to implement this in some personal projects as well!
Open to feedback or tips and tricks on this, but so far it's looking promising. Curious how other folks experience has been.