New website live
Welcome to my new website! It truly has been a long time coming. After a short downtime of almost 6 years, it's time for a comeback.
Introduction
Let me briefly introduce myself. Hi, I'm Roel, a software and DevOps engineer from the Netherlands. Over the last 20 years I have built up experience in various programming languages and environments. Currently, my main focus is on developing cloud-native/distributed applications using Go and container technologies such as Docker and Kubernetes. I'm a big fan of the 12factor app and use DevOps/GitOps principles wherever they are a good fit.
I'm also a creator/maintainer of several opensource projects and packages, and I love to tinker with all kinds of tech-related stuff. Of course, as a tech enthusiast, I also have an overpowered homelab and a decent amount of smart home tech installed in my house. The homelab runs Kubernetes based on Talos Linux and was featured on Sidero Labs' blog (scroll to the "Supermicro + Proxmox" heading). This is actually an older setup which has changed quite a bit; more on that later...
A long time ago...
According to the whois information, I registered the domain name roelschut.nl on February 4th of 2012. Looking at the Wayback Machine, the first actual website appeared not until October 2014. Before that it would redirect any visitor to another website of mine, roelschut-fotografie.nl.
Several different iterations using different backends/frontends have been in development, but none of them ever really went past the alpha phase. Somewhere in January of 2019 I decided to just pull the plug and redirect the domain to my LinkedIn page. Frontend development was not something I enjoyed much anymore. The focus of my career shifted from being a full-stack web developer to a backend developer to a software and DevOps engineer.
The future
This time I'll try to keep it relatively simple so I can focus on creating some interesting content. This means I won't be using a (self-created) CMS or any other fancy backend solutions. The current version is build using TailwindCSS for basic styling together with Svelte, which I really like so far. Actually, as of writing, the website is statically generated using SvelteKit and is hosted using GitHub Pages. A pretty decent solution which kind of works until I find a good way to safely expose my internal Kubernetes cluster to the big bad internet.
I'd like to write more how-to/tutorial-based articles on a regular basis, based on techniques/tools I use myself or are inspired by others. The first tutorial is almost finished and features setting up Traefik with a custom root certificate on TrueNAS. Another one I'm working on is related to creating a Talos Kubernetes cluster using Omni on bare-metal machines.
I've got a gazillion other ideas, so if you're into this kind of stuff, make sure to keep an eye out :)