Adam Jacques

Software Engineer

Blog Posts

I occasionally write blog posts where I talk about software, hardware, or even plants that I'm working on.

Recent Posts

Over-engineering my Home Assistant HVAC Dashboard

Ever wondered how well your HVAC system is working in your home or condo? I did to an unhealthy degree. I want to know not just what’s the temperature, but how often is it running, what’s the supply and return temperatures, etc.? Let’s overengineer another project.

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Abandon the Helm, leveraging CDK for Kubernetes

I’ve had enough of Helm. I don’t know who thought string-based templating engines would be a good idea, but I have had one too many indention relate bugs. They’re a source of bug and a pain. Kubernetes YAML files just contain a ton of boiler-plate YAML configuration. Like how many times do I have to specify the labels? Its spec/template/spec for Deployment, but spec/jobTemplate/spec for CronJob. Ain’t nobody got time to remember that.

Enter cdk8s. It’s built-upon CDK, a software development kit that uses standard programming languages, like TypeScript, Python, or Java, as a way to define resources that then get compiled into YAML or JSON to upload to CloudFormation, or in our case, Kubernetes.

Why would you want/need a full programming language just to define some infrastructure? Well, there are some benefits. Let’s go through them.

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This blog is now on ASP.NET Core

This blog is a static website compiled using Hugo. Up to this point, I built the website and packaged all of the assets into a Docker container with NGINX which was hosted on my dedicated server cluster.

This worked well and was simple, but I have an upcoming project that I’ll be announcing soon that required dynamic content that nginx + pure static files wasn’t easily able to implement with NGINX.

To fix this, I decided to migrate this blog from NGINX to ASP.NET Core. Here’s how and why.

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