Ian Fijolek - cat /dev/null

Tacos, Time, and Task Management

The world demands far more of us than what we can possibly provide and it’s up to us to use our time in the best way possible. Far easier said than done, it requires diligent (and ruthless) prioritization of what matters.

Career

A journey from engineer to management and back again

At the beginning of 2022 I chose to laterally transition back into an engineer after 6 years in engineering management. There are not many examples of folks making this transition, so I want to share my journey.

Self Hosting

My personal cloud journey

How I took ownership of my data and got off the public cloud

iOS

An iPad Pro as a PC

Lately I’ve been using an iPad Pro 11" with a folding keyboard case as a laptop replacement. Here's how I think it stacks up for my three main use cases: Entertainment, Web browsing, and Development

Work

More to life than work

Balancing your work and life is important to keep stress in check and improve ones productivity and long-term happiness at work. Many people talk about work-life balance but also struggle with maintaining it. It can be hard, especially a world of smartphones constantly buzzing and dinging with the latest notification

Self Hosting

What's in a Cloud?

When I decided to begin hosting my own cloud services and get off Google, Microsoft, etc., the first thing I did was start documenting the things I absolutely needed. I ended up with a list of things that I think most people care about: Email Contacts Calendar File storage Kanban

Python

Alfred Yubico Authenticator

Alfred Workflow to filter and retrieve TOTP codes from your Yubikey

Programming

Dockron: Simple scheduling for Docker

What is Dockron? Dockron is a simple way to execute short-running containers on a schedule via Docker labels using minimal configuration.

Self Hosting

Putting Faces to Names

Improving the self hosted experience by syncing Google and Gravatar profile photos to Nextcloud/ownCloud contacts

Self Hosting

Minitor: A Minimal Monitoring Tool

If a service isn’t monitored, is it really running? The age old question. Since I started my voyage into self hosting, it had been mostly smooth sailing. That is, until the other day when, after about a year, I had my first server outage. The importance of knowing It

Self Hosting

Building a self-hosted email assistant

A little over a year ago I began my journey into self-hosting, and today I am off Google services. Initially, I had no issues giving up a few of the more minor features I couldn't replace. Things like auto identifying events, flight information, and package tracking in emails are each

Linux

Docker Orchestration from the Couch

When I decided to begin self hosting, I decided that I was going to do it with Docker very early on. Docker provides a good way for me to manage deployments without worrying about how different service dependencies might interact or how installation may vary depending on the distro that

Vim

Dynamic Vim Themes

Obsessively keeping my Vim and Terminal themes in sync

Freedom

Mastochistic

So I jumped on Mastodon recently. Before I get into my experience, I should probably explain a little about what it is. The Federalist Tweets Mastodon is a federated social network. Federated systems don't have one server (like Twitter or Facebook), instead there are many Mastodon instances that you can

Self Hosting

Self Hosting: But why tho?

Why would I, or anyone for that matter, go through the effort of self hosting their own web services when Google, Apple, and Microsoft all have powerful, free options? Are we paranoid? Bored? Masochistic? Maybe, but for many of us it comes down to being free. To be clear, I'm

Self Hosting

Lessons in Self Hosting

Several months ago, I decided to liberate myself from the corporate cloud ecosystem that I have been so heavily invested in. This was a decision based partly on political factors, but also heavily on my curiosity. I knew there would probably be trade offs, but I didn't know enough about