Home-cooked Utility Scripts # I write a lot of utility scripts for work and personal projects. Ideally, anything repetitive I have to do more than a few times has a script to automate it. With the advent of LLMs, the time needed to generate something useful has gone down dramatically. There was a recent discussion on the excellent Software Defined Talk podcast about the kind of CLI-lifestyle this kind of development enables.

I recently finished revamping my homelab, and I’m very excited about it. For the past 6+ months my “homelab” consisted of an old laptop running Linux and a bunch of docker containers. This worked surprisingly well, but increasingly I found myself wanted to spin up test envrionments of multiple machines. That old laptop didn’t have the power to support those kinds of labs, and I didn’t have a good set of tooling for creating, configuring, and backing up these VM or container stacks.