Fieldnotes on Ellie Augustini

My service supported IPv6. The application did not.

Sun, 06 Sep 2026 10:27:00 +0200

IPv6 has been the future of the internet since 1998, which makes it one of our most successful long-running science-fiction franchises.

I like IPv6. My Talos cluster is dual-stack. The nodes understand it, Kubernetes allocates it, Cilium routes it, the Gateways advertise it, and DNS publishes it. There are enough colons in the network configuration to make a C++ programmer feel emotionally supported.

My Git forge issued 2.1 million challenges. Only 20 were solved.

Thu, 03 Sep 2026 21:07:00 +0200

Self-hosting used to mean worrying about disks, backups and whether the tiny computer under the stairs had developed opinions about thermodynamics.

Now it also means watching automated clients come through apparent residential addresses and request every source tree, blame page, commit, comparison and archive on your Git forge as quickly as the application can regret serving them.

I was grinding myself down

Fri, 24 Jul 2026 08:30:00 +0200

The grindset has a wonderfully simple user interface.

Whatever you have, select more. Whatever you achieve, mark it insufficient. If you are tired, that is a configuration error in your morning routine. Have you tried waking at 04:30, drinking something the colour of reactor coolant and listening to a podcast where a man with three assistants explains self-reliance?

Your tools do not need to be the future

Sat, 18 Jul 2026 18:30:00 +0200

Every few months, programming announces that everything you know is obsolete.

A new language, editor or framework appears. Its website has a dark background, one suspiciously perfect benchmark and a code sample compressing twelve deliberately ugly lines into three that nobody has deployed. Within a week, people happy on Tuesday are writing migration plans on Friday.

I will not optimize the joy out of writing again

Fri, 17 Jul 2026 18:30:00 +0200

Every personal website eventually receives the most dangerous kind of feature request: a perfectly reasonable one.

Why do you only write in English? You are Swedish. Would you not reach more people if you translated the articles? Perhaps add a newsletter while you are there. Maybe publish more regularly. Have you considered SEO? A membership tier? Sponsored posts? Short videos in which the first sentence appears as six different captions while I point at a terminal?

Raindance and the Dark Art of Putting a Minus Sign in Column 140

Fri, 17 Jul 2026 03:00:00 +0200

Modern software has trained us to expect data formats with luxuries such as named fields, explicit structure, machine-readable schemas and the occasional error message that does not read like a ransom note.

Sweden needs a minPension for debt

Thu, 16 Jul 2026 10:42:00 +0200

Sweden has built a national pension portal capable of finding money scattered across decades, employers, public systems and private pension companies, then presenting it as one comprehensible forecast.

At some point, every application became a landlord

Tue, 14 Jul 2026 14:00:00 +0200

At some point, every application became a landlord.

Your photos live in one company’s building. Your email lives in another. Your documents, passwords, conversations, calendar, finances, recipes, artwork and half-finished thoughts each occupy a furnished little room in somebody else’s data centre. The rent looks harmless because it arrives in twelve separate subscriptions, each priced somewhere between “a coffee” and “surely I cancelled this.”

Hacking Mealie for fun and dinner

Tue, 14 Jul 2026 10:00:00 +0200

There is a very specific kind of optimism involved in clicking Import recipe and expecting a food blog to become structured data.

The pink keyboard firmware incident

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 02:32:21 +0200

Buying a keyboard because it is pink is a perfectly reasonable engineering decision. Anyone who disagrees has never spent eight hours a day communicating with a computer through a beige rectangle designed by a committee that thought “texture” meant “slightly different plastic sadness.”

How this site works: a tiny static site in a surprisingly serious trenchcoat

Sun, 07 Jun 2026 14:00:00 +0200

This website looks like a small terminal window that wandered into a pastel cabinet. That is the fun part. The less visible part is that it is built like a production service: reproducible static build, minimal container, private registry, pinned deployments, restricted Kubernetes namespace, Gateway API routes, and OpenTofu state living in a Rook Ceph object store.