I have not been working on side projects in a few months. I’ve been busy with life, family, and health. However, I finally feel ready to return to it.

I’ve been in a bit of a dry-spell regarding side-projects and learning. Sure, I’ve put up my notes website, and I’ve finally been a little more disciplined about a blog than I have been, but I want to return to building things. I haven’t taken the Shelfie project beyond a proof-of-concept, and I’d like to do that.

Setting Up the Cluster

I’ve finally setup the ClusterHat 2.2 once again. It’s been so long since I bought it, that I’ve forgotten that I needed to run clusterctrl on to turn on each individual nodes.

Raspberry Pi Clusters

And I’ve installed Unbound on my PiHole last night. That was quite a ride since it kept messing up my DNS quite a bit. I still don’t understand what a Recursive DNS Server does, though. It seems to continue to ask public DNS servers about addresses, which is what I assumed PiHole does in the first place. However, it caches them also? Didn’t PiHole do that already? I need to look into it more. Perhaps this warrants an entirely separate post.

Learning Goals

For now, I’m going to work on installing Hadoop on the ClusterHat. I want to use this opportunity to learn MapReduce and understand how Hadoop actually works. I’d also like to shard a postgresql database on them as well, and stress test them both. I want to keep changing what I use the smaller cluster for.

Let me make a list of things I want to test on this cluster.

  1. Hadoop and MapReduce
  2. Postgresql sharding
  3. Dask
  4. Distributed Redis
  5. Distributed MongoDB

Alongside these, I also want to do the following:

  1. Rewrite the sarathi bot.
  2. Improve the til page, or put it up on a new page, perhaps til.stonecharioteer.com, so that I can use React to build a much more fluid page.
  3. Learn Rust and switch to Rust for leetcode.
  4. Build a generic PaaS on Rust with a UI in React. The service I want to integrate first is postgresql.

I also have a series of posts on how to write documentation that I want to finish. The entire family came down with Covid so I couldn’t get around to it. I’ll finish those up this month as well.