I've been outside April 8, 2025 on Jonathan's Blog

So much has happened since my previous post, so here is the update.

Life

In my last post I mentioned that I was engaged and planning to buy a house.

Shortly after that post we started the house hunting process and after nearly 15 months we finally completed on our purchase. Then, just six weeks later, we got married!

We then spent a couple of weeks taking it slow on Honeymoon in Croatia.

The (nearly) a year since has been great too, we’ve travelled, made our house into a home, made memories with friends and family, and found our new normal after being in a state of flux for a few years.

I talked about wanting to get back into hiking, and while it may not be hiking, I have been walking more, and exploring the surrounding area.

The plan is to keep travelling and exploring, and we would also like to adopt/rescue a cat at some point this year 🐱. Our garden is the priority at home this year, and it’s been really nice to spend time outside in this unseasonably mild spring weather.

Work

Quite a bit has happened here too:

• December 2022: I was promoted to Site Reliability Engineer

• April 2024: The platform I was working on was deprecated and I was moved to a new team

• September 2024: I moved to Sky Protect, and was promoted to Senior SRE

It’s been a big change working for Sky Protect, but it’s definitely interesting and a good opportunity for growth, in what is a relatively new team.

Homelab

My Homelab is really the reason my blog exists, so it gets it’s own section.

After I moved house my Homelab became a 24/7 feature again, it even got an upgrade, with more RAM and some hard-drives. More recently I’ve ditched K8s and focused on the few main services I actually use:

• Paperless: Scans / “paper” documents
• Immich: Photos - although I still rely heavily on Google Photos
• Nextcloud: File sync

These are all exposed via Traefik reverse proxy and backed-up with Borgmatic to my Hetzner storage box. It works like a charm, is low maintenance and is simple enough that I don’t have to re-learn everything if I step away for a couple of months.

I’d like to have a “lab” again, but I don’t get all that much time to sink into it at the moment (see Life). For now, Home automation is scratching-the-itch. I have Home Assistant on a Raspberry Pi 5 (overkill), and have been enjoying tinkering when I can - all Wife Approved of course!

Next

I make no promises about when I’ll blog next - I guess it will be when I have another big update to share.

Until next time…