Re: [PLUG] Assessing interest in potential PLUG topics

[Rich Freeman via plug <plug@lists.phillylinux.org>]

On Sat, Jan 21, 2023 at 12:24 PM Syeed Ali via plug
<plug@lists.phillylinux.org> wrote:
>
> On Tue, 17 Jan 2023 13:49:11 -0500
> Rich Freeman via plug <plug@lists.phillylinux.org> wrote:
>
> > Most of these would be from the perspective of somebody who has just
> > gone through learning something from the first time, so I'd try to
> > talk about lessons learned, tips for deciphering concepts in
> > documentation, etc.
>
> It's meta, but if you have a learning process that you've either
> re-used or adjusted for each topic, I'd be curious about that.
>

I doubt it would make for an interesting talk (at least from me), but
I'll try to quickly summarize my goals/approach:

k8s - one of my goals moving to k8s is to have something that was more
self-documenting.  My previous containers were manually built and
maintained in place over a long time.  The goal moving to k8s was to
reduce everything to a few config files so that containers could be
built on-demand.  Much of my learning approach was oriented around
this - taking lots of notes and cleaning them up as I backtracked, and
then wiping and rebuilding things from the docs as I went.  The result
is a cluster that in theory I can rebuild from bare metal in the
fewest steps possible.  Of course since I was learning there were
plenty of false starts.

Home Assistant - main goal here was to try to keep things more
out-of-the-box and GUI-driven, compared to my previous OpenHAB
solution.  So the process mostly involved installing the OS and then
looking for whatever way HA endorses to solve a problem.  In the end I
only needed a few lines of anything resembling code (mostly around
managing the color temps of my Hue lights).  There really wasn't too
much to this as it was pretty easy to learn.

3D Printing - this was a case of having a little project I wanted to
accomplish (printing some parts for my gaming throttle), and then
figuring out what tools I needed to use to accomplish this.  Then I
would just look for little projects to do and learn what is needed at
each stage.

Frigate - I was starting with the goal in mind, which was capturing
video from surveillance cameras.  One of my goals is having the
ability to notify me when somebody walks up to a door.  Then I
basically looked for potential solutions that could do this.  Frigate
itself is pretty simple.  This actually was one of the projects that
pushed me to migrate to k8s and Home Assistant.  I knew I needed more
hardware to handle all the video, and so that was an opportunity to
deploy k8s.  Then once I realized I wanted Frigate I discovered that
it basically needed Home Assistant to send notifications, so that
pushed me to adopt it (this was something I was already considering).

Ceph/Rook - with Ceph a big goal here was to understand how all the
components work (to a lesser degree this is also true of k8s).  I've
found that with storage it tends to pay to understand how the
underlying data structures/algorithms/etc work because these often
drive the capabilities of the solution.  Ceph is a little less
plug-and-play than a lot of other solutions so it really makes sense
to understand what you're getting into before you go loading
terrabytes of data onto it.  Once you understand ceph and k8s then the
Rook part mostly makes sense, but of course it has its own little
quirks.

As you can see there really wasn't one way I'd go about learning.  I
often work either top-down or bottom-up depending on what I'm
interested in.  I usually don't have a goal of learning everything
about a topic, but rather trying to learn the things I need to in
order to accomplish my goals, and minimize my blind spots (turning
unknown unknowns into known unknowns).  For most of these projects I
wanted to have something that "just works" before I started taking it
apart and making things more complex.  (This is part of why I elected
not to build my first 3D printer from a kit.)

-- 
Rich
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