Automation

Raspberry Pi’s are great little devices for various purposes. I’ve got a couple of Pi4’s for my homelab. That said, you’d probably be lying to me if you told me you were enthusiastic about the following scenario, especially if you make a lot of changes and/or try a lot of different operating system versions: Unplug Pi Remove storage device (SD/SSD) Plug storage device into PC Flash OS image to device Unplug device from PC Plug back into Pi Plug Pi back in Configure Pi after it boots I developed a solution for my homelab which allows me to re-provision my Pis on demand using a more traditional remote-provisioning paradigm, without having to touch any of them....

A little while ago I spent some time writing various Ansible roles and playbooks for the infrastructure at my place of work. My Ansible skills are intermediate and by no means refined. As a result of this, a lot of the roles were not developed to best practice specifications. I took some time to try to improve my roles and properly test them before using them by taking advantages of the free continuous testing service that Travis-CI offers....

Blasting Students with Science I was recently invited to give a workshop on reproducible scientific workflows to students as part of the Inter-university Institute for Data Intensive Astronomy’s (IDIA) “JEDI” programme. The overall purpose of this workshop was to introduce students from the African continent to various topics that are being dealt with in the data science space. A large focus here was machine learning. This post details some of my experiences with preparing the original pipeline, working CWL around it and also teaching people how to do it....