Fresh/Brewed

Idp, locally, with Authentik

Tue, 08 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0500

Recently I saw this Marius post on self-hosting Authentik, an Open-Source Identity Provider system. He covered the container setup, but I wasn’t really sure what one could do with it.

Today we’ll look at launching it in Docker and Kubernetes. We’ll show some configuration options (as well as what is behind a paywall). Lastly, we’ll fire a up new Python based sample application (code provided) and walk through Authentik setup. Lastly, we’ll cover local users, usage and more before wrapping with some Databasus PostgreSQL backups.

Bye Windows

Thu, 03 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0500

Well I did it. It was a really strange feeling, to be honest, but I pulled the plug and wiped my windows SSD and finally loaded Linux on my last working Windows.

The gaming rig (whatever that has been at any given time) has always been Windows with WSL for fun and Steam for play. But every game is now supported quite well on Steam and I was tired of babying the 1Tb drive as my fun work in WSL was always bloating up the filesystem.

OS Apps: Databasus, CTRoadmap

Tue, 01 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0500

Let’s take a moment to check out some open source apps that have been on my list for a bit. The first is “Databasus” which is PostgreSQL/MySQL backup service that can run locally, in docker and in Kubernetes. We’re going to try backing up some PostgreSQL DBs as well as MariaDB 10 databases to a variety of endpoints.

A while back I saw this Marius post on CTRoadMap which describes itself as “Homelab Server Network Diagram & Documentation for Mapping Function Topology”. We’ll take a look at this and how to run in docker as well as externalizing with Kubernetes.

OpenAPI (Swagger) Generator

Thu, 27 Aug 2026 00:00:00 -0500

Around five years ago, for OSN 2021, I gave a talk on Full Stack CICD of Kubernetes Microservices using DevOps and IAC. I was discussing some of our setup we used at Medtronic for the CRHF group and specifically I spoke on using Swagger gen for .NET and Java client bindings.

Recently, I was made aware of a refresh of that Swagger gen project called OpenAPITools/OpenApi-Generator.

It is a java app so you can easily pull it down and run it with anything newer than JDK 11. However, I had adding Java to anything (not because I have a hatred of Java, just it’s a lot of bloat just to run a tool).

Getting started with FleetDM

Tue, 25 Aug 2026 00:00:00 -0500

I was recently chatting with some colleagues about deployment tooling and FleetDM came up. I felt like I was aware of most deployment tools but this was new to me.

Logos are how companies show brands that use their products and of whom they are proud to share. So it is a severe negative to me they show Flock amongst their scrolling list.

But let’s still consider them as they are Open Source and easy to deploy

Gitea ist Kaput

Thu, 20 Aug 2026 00:00:00 -0500

Gitea went kaput. Just up and stopped working one day. I came back from the BWCA and noticed none of my automated builds had succeeded:

The errors were all about “back pack header”

I tried many things - restarting Kubernetes, docker, upgrading the container image. All the things that usually ‘unstuck’ a Gitea instance just weren’t.

Any local pull or clone would fail

builder@DESKTOP-QADGF36:~/Workspaces/fbsnew$ git pull
fatal: protocol error: bad pack header

It wasn’t disk space

Browser Use

Tue, 18 Aug 2026 00:00:00 -0500

I had a bookmark (not sure where I saw it) for Browser Use. It’s a geared for agentic work, of course, but the idea is ephemeral and scheduled web browser related flows that are easy to script with NodeJS or python.

It has a free tier so there is no reason not to give it a go and see what it can do.

Setup

We can signup here with username/password or a federated IdP. I’ll do the latter with google

Creating and using AI Skills

Thu, 13 Aug 2026 00:00:00 -0500

I’ve had AI Skills on the mind lately and realized I had neglected updating a few of my own and it was high time to handle that.

In this article we’ll cover installing and using some common public skills, like Anthropic’s skills and specifically their “skill creator” skill. We’ll use that in Google Antigravity and Copilot to cleanup an older Python App skill I have.

We’ll then test using the Python App skill in Cline, a local CLI Harness with a 12b gemma4 model running in Ollama on a laptop with a 12Gb 3070 card in it.

Nextchat Librechat and Mistral AI

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 00:00:00 -0500

I had a couple of sites bookmarked to circle back on: Nextchat.club and LibreChat. I’m not certain what they really are, just that they were on an AI startup leader board recently.

The other AI offering I haven’t visited in some time is Mistral. I liked the early Mistral models for coding. I also like that it’s based in France.

Nextchat.club

We can sign-up at nextchat.club/login:

in the Application area we can pick a persona. Here I’ll pick a resume writer

A 1980s Airline Repair guide may be a cure for AI Slop

Thu, 06 Aug 2026 00:00:00 -0500

In the last few days I’ve been rather fixated on this YouTube video called “The cure for AI slop is a 1986 aircraft manual”. If you like more of a narrative, pause here and watch the video.

First, a bit of context…

Simplified Technical English has its starts going all the way back to the 1930s with “Basic English” and later the 1970s with CFE, Caterpillar Technical English and Kodak International Service Language (KISL). Per the CFE documentation:

Antigravity Status Lines

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 -0500

I was recently working in Antigravity trying to fix some stylesheets when I hit my AI Pro limit:

That hadn’t happened to me until today (and I bounced over to Github Copilot to finish the task), but the situation reminded me of a project I had bookmarked some time back, Agy Statusline

And once I started setting up status lines, it sparked me to look at a few more options. In this post we’ll actually explore five different status line offerings from a variety of developers.

Herdr and Hunk

Thu, 30 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0500

Herdr is an interesting project that I noted initially as a TMUX variant, but really is much much more. It’s designed to ‘herd’ your long running LLM agents to make it much easier to dance between sessions. I’m not a AI Agent gangsta like I know some are, but I do like to mutli-task over a lot of windows and wanted to give it a good try.

Another tool on my list is a command line Diff viewer, Hunk. I saw Hunk used in a YT video and thought it looked pretty slick. We’ll check that out as well.

Auth0 and Ornith 9b

Tue, 28 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0500

Two things I want to tackle today. The first is testing out Auth0 which is a well established Federated IdP provider. However, I really haven’t looked at it in years. No reason for that, just my needs are generally met by just one ore two IdPs which are easy enough to setup.

The other area I want to explore is the new Ornith:9b LLM model. It’s supposedly self-improving. That said… I have concerns… such as their announcement text has multiple misspelled words (not a good sign)

Small OS: Notediscovery (with MCP) and Lockstep

Thu, 23 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0500

Today we’ll take a look at NoteDiscovery, a very interesting Markdown tool that is more geared towards Knowledge management for GenAI then for documentation (Like Docussaurus and the like). We will look at using it in docker and it’s MCP server. Could we make our own self-hosted chatbot system?

We will also look at Lockstep, a security auditing tool that helps people focus on best practices and compliance.

NoteDiscovery

Let’s take a look at NoteDiscovery which I saw in this Marius post a while back.

AI Code Reviews with Ollama

Tue, 21 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0500

In recent times I have been looking closely into AI Code Reviews using tools like Github Copilot, which consumes my tokens and uses Azure/Microsoft resources. I have also looked at offerings from Qodo as well as CodeRabbit.

All these SaaS tool suites are great, no doubt, but they all cost money. I got to thinking, could I not accomplish the same thing locally?

Setup

I’ll want to use an Ollama host in my network.

OpenObserve

Thu, 16 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0500

I found out a person from a developer portal company I was looking into had recently moved to OpenObserve. I was chatting with them on LinkedIn about other topics but figured I should really give OpenObserve a look as I’ve often looked at Observability tools, small and large, over the years.

Company

OpenObserve is a relative up and comer started in 2022 by Prabhat Sharma as ZincSearch before pivoting to Observability. Its still relatively small with an estimated 11-50 employees and based in Menlo Park, CA. That said, it’s recently closed some Series A in April with Nexus Venture Partners and Dell Tech Capital so perhaps it’s poised to grow.

Ratatui (and VHS)

Tue, 14 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0500

Of all places, I found Ratatui from a post on Threads. It’s basically a really light fast Rust-based Terminal User Interface (TUI).

It has some VHS examples as well. I haven’t used VHS before so let’s see what that is about as we build out our own TUI using the framework with Google Antigravity.

Ratatui

Let’s start by cloning the GIT repo

I realized my local rust environment was way out of date

$ cargo version
cargo 1.74.0 (ecb9851af 2023-10-18)

so i did a brew install rust to update it to current.

Zed Editor

Thu, 09 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0500

I had a note to circle back on Zed. I had looked nearly a year go in August 2025 at their preview feature for AI. At the time, Windows wasn’t there (only via Scoop). I also was far more tied to VS Code so I wasn’t really looking at Zed as a possible replacement.

Times have changed, and Zed has advanced quite a lot. So let’s give it another go and this time I’ll be looking at it as a real possible replacement for VS Code (especially as my primary machines are all now Linux based).

Home Lab Updates

Tue, 07 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0500

In moving our primary blogging system from Github over to a self hosted Gitea, we need to sort out how to best create a proper HA DR environment. This means having some push mirrors. The first thing I did when i setup Gitea to be the “real” repo for this blog was to mirror it to Forgejo. However that instance is on the same cluster, so if there is a catastrophic outage, then I would expect both to be down and have to rely on whatever my last local clone happens to be.

Let's make an MCP Server and Skill!

Mon, 06 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0500

Let’s Make and MCP Server (And Skill)!

MCP servers are fundamentally tool-providers to our Agentic Gen AI tools and provide a robust vendor-agnostic solution to building and sharing custom tooling to the overall Open Source community.

And making one is not as hard as some might think. Today we’ll explore making an MCP server as well as a Skill and hosting them both locally and in GCP. We’ll cover usage patterns and wrap with costs and next steps.

Congrats. You're suspended.

Thu, 02 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0500

Congratulations! You have been flagged for something.

Who knows exactly, but you soon are clued in that something is amiss when your gcloud commands began to fail

$ gcloud dns --project=myanthosproject2 record-sets list --zone="steepedicu"
ERROR: (gcloud.dns.record-sets.list) PERMISSION_DENIED: Permission denied: Consumer 'projects/myanthosproject2' has been suspended. This command is authenticated as isaac.johnson@gmail.com which is the active account specified by the [core/account] property.
Permission denied: Consumer 'projects/myanthosproject2' has been suspended.
- '@type': type.googleapis.com/google.rpc.ErrorInfo
  domain: googleapis.com
  metadata:
    consumer: projects/511842454269
    containerInfo: projects/myanthosproject2
    service: dns
  reason: CONSUMER_SUSPENDED

You then notice that AI apps cannot use Vertex anymore

Don't Freak Out.

Tue, 30 Jun 2026 00:00:00 -0500

I have been rocking a Jekyll blog now since around 2021. This blogging site started out in 2019 using Ghost which I automated back then with Azure DevOps.

Over all this time, I have written over 500 posts and just the CICD updates, for which I have optimized as best i can are 16 to 25 minutes long. The blogs Github repo is nearly 25Gb expanded!

I’ll admit that I am a data hoarder (my wife may just scratch out the word “data” there). I have a hard time purging anything. I have a box of Palm pilots, Windows XP tablet PCs and a working MiniDisc recorder (I will never give it up).

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

Courses

I created a Udemy course on Open Telemetry here

For the month of July 2026 you can use this code for 50% of ($10 instead of $20): 9D9D6DBB930651C3CC61

Presentations

May 2026 : “Let’s build an MCP Server (and Skills!)”, presented at OpenSourceNorth : YouTube
May 2026 : “Vertex AI and n8n, low-code workflows, now served at home!”, presented at GDG Brunei: YouTube
March 2025: “NUG25 Otel NR Ai Tooling with Gemini CLI and Qwen Coder”, presented at NUG 2025L YouTube

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

About Me

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

About Me

Isaac is a Cloud Solutions Architect and DevOps/SRE Architect who focuses on cloud migrations and DevOps + SRE processes. He also is a dad to three wonderful daughters (hence the references to Princess King sprinkled throughout the blog).

With a background as a Cloud and SRE Architect, I have a passion for process and building out scalable solutions. My career has spanned over 20 years experience, and I’ve had the honor of working at local companies such as Medtronic, Abbott, Thomson Reuters, and CH Robinson with a focus on SRE, DevOps and Cloud Migrations. Today, as a Senior Staff Cloud Architect at Abbott (SJM) in the Structured Heart division, my focus is on transcatheter aortic valve implantation (TAVI) next generation solutions. I live in Woodbury, MN and enjoy camping, canoeing and fishing with three wonderful daughters.

Posts Archive

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