ImDevinC

Making my home automation setup family friendly

Thu, 28 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Home automation is great… for tech people

Like a lot of people recently, I’ve been diving into different pieces of home automation for my house. I see lots of really cool YouTube videos from people who post their very elaborate setups with tons of really cool features and that do insane things. I would like to get to that point eventually, where walking between rooms toggles lights, my blinds adjust based on my activities throughout the day, and who knows what else. One major piece that I feel is missing from these setups is making sure that the automations are friendly not only for the family living in the house (a lot of people do think about this), but also for when people come to visit our watch the house and we aren’t home. That’s what I need to solve for.

Securing my homelab

Fri, 25 Oct 2024 04:35:53 +0000

Introduction

Awhile ago I setup my homelab running on a kubernetes server sitting in my office. You can read about it in my other blog post here: Migrating my homelab. One thing that security focused people will probably immediately notice, is that I have public facing services but no mention of a firewall or security product. Luckily, I have yet to have anything negative happen, but that doesn’t mean people haven’t tried. If I occasionally look at my access logs, I can see quite a few random IP’s hitting my endpoints looking for something. I stumbled upon a reddit post in /r/homelab where someone was using Crowdsec, and that’s what prompted me to start digging in.

Using Terraform to manage 100+ AWS Accounts

Mon, 30 Oct 2023 14:57:06 +0000

The Issue

While browsing /r/terraform the other day, I stumbled upon a post from someon asking how to use Terraform to manage AWS multi-account deployments at scale. The actual question (copied here in case it goes away) was:

Say you have 500 AWS accounts and you need to provision and update their landing zone infrastructure (VPC, logging, IAM, etc.) using Terraform. How would you do it so that changes are deployed parallel to the accounts to speed up deployments? There would need to be one central deployment account which assumes a trust role in target accounts and has account spesific state files in central S3 as well.

OpenComp

Tue, 28 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I’m a huge supporter of sharing compensation values amongst peers (or people who are looking to become peers). Hiding your compensation doesn’t benefit anyone other than a company trying to low-ball you, and sharing your compensation with others helps make sure that we’re all working from the same information and getting paid what we’re worth. Below you can find my titles and and compensation at the time (to the best of my memory).

Migrating my homelab

Sun, 22 Jan 2023 00:43:38 +0000

Note, this will be a very high level overview of how I got my cluster and services running. If you would like more detail of how I did this, please let me know and I can break these down in a separate post in the future

Introduction

A few years ago, I setup Proxmox on my homelab server to manage multiple VM’s and configurations. Since then, I realized that I wasn’t really using the VM’s anymore other than running one VM that housed all my docker services and one containerized version of HomeAssistant. In my main VM that housed all my docker services, I ran Portainer to help maintain my services and keep things a bit more organized. This worked wel labout 90% of the time, but I ran into a few issues that were annoying:

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Hi, I’m Devin Collins. I’m a software developer who enjoys automating processes, learning new things, and just in general finding ways to make things for easier for myself, my friends, my family, and anyone I can really.

In the past, I’ve tried to make consistent blog posts but fell out of it pretty quickly. So instead of trying that, and feeling bad when I can’t, this is more of a place for me to keep thoughts and ideas about things I’ve been up. That could range from being a parent, working on open source applications, or just random musings of things I’m trying to learn.