Fresh/Brewed

OS IaC: Pyinfra

A Python-based IaC

Recently I gave an Infrastructure as Code (IaC) talk on Open-Source tooling and focused on Ansible and OpenTofu. One of the participants asked me about Pyinfra which I had never heard of before. Pyinfra is fully MIT licensed and seems rather full featured. Today we will get it setup locally, create some basic “deploys” (their word for playbooks), then look at remote deploys before showing how we can create scheduled YAML based pipelines to launch and manage infrastructure with Pyinfra.

Hallmark Skill

A UI skill, not a cheesy rom com

I saw this new Hallmark design skill that usehallmark.com put out. It exposes roughly 50 different themes from Editorial to Modern minimal, Atmospheric to Playful. It’s made by a couple of guys, Hassan El Mghari and Youssef El Mghari which I assume are relatives (but have no confirmation). They build very cool Open-Source and AI driven sites such as RoomGPT.io and self.so and this very cool AI Papers site, 1kpapers.comm. Let’s check out their skill, which despite the graphic, really has nothing to do with the Greeting card company (which is now more known for cheesy romantic movies).

OS Apps: Antimatter

Some fun with OS Mattermost

I last looked at the OS version of Mattermost back in 2024 and over time people wanted a more open-source native fork. Antimatter forked from mattermost back in Sept of this year but is very active with 1338 commits since forking as of writing. Let’s see what is new by firing this up locally with a local build… Antimatter Let’s clone isaac@isaac-G707:~/Workspaces$ git clone https://github.com/AntimatterChat/antimatter-docker.git Cloning into 'antimatter-docker'... remote: Enumerating objects: 195, done. remote: Counting objects: 100% (195/195), done. remote: Compressing objects: 100% (90/90), done. remote: Total 195 (delta 98), reused 178 (delta 81), pack-reused 0 (from 0) Receiving objects: 100% (195/195), 79.34 KiB | 1.53 MiB/s, done. Resolving deltas: 100% (98/98), done. isaac@isaac-G707:~/Workspaces$ cd antimatter-docker/ isaac@isaac-G707:~/Workspaces/antimatter-docker$ I tried local builds by cloning various Antimatter repos but high a roadblock with metrics

OS Apps: GCP Custom UI, Ripasso and PixelTools

A fun mixed bag of goodness

Today we’ll look at a few interesting apps that have been on my list: GCP Custom UI, Ripasso password manager and PixelTools. The first two are open-source but the last is a free to use SaaS suite based on Open-Source frameworks so I’m including it. Let’s start with the powerful GCP Custom UI written by a fellow GDE Aliane Abdelouahab GCP Custom UI Aliane in the GDE community has been busy working on this “gcp-custom-ui” app for some time. They would get excited and post updates and even take feature requests. I decided it had grown big enough it was worth a deep dive just on its own.

IaC Cleanup and Cloud Cost Optimizing

Let's save some money

In my recent IaCConf talk, I showed some demos from this IacConf2026demo repo. One launched to Azure as an Azure function using Tofu, and the other used AWX with a playbook to launch another container to GCP. However, leaving these running all the time will really mount costs. In both GCP And in Azure Cleanup with Tofu In IaCConf talk I demonstrated using tofu plan and tofu apply to create the infrastructure.