AI coding assistants were always going to force this conversation eventually. Tools like Copilot, ChatGPT, and Claude can draft code quickly, explain unfamiliar sections, and help contributors move through a patch faster than they could on their own. That is useful. It is also exactly the kind of shift that was bound to run into the Linux kernel's standards around trust, review, authorship, and licensing.
The kernel is not a project where code gets merged because it looks plausible. It is a project where contributors are expected to understand what they send, defend it under review, and stand behind it legally and technically. That is what makes the new guidance on AI-generated and tool-generated contributions worth paying attention to.
I can lose twenty minutes in the space between one text message and putting my phone back down. It starts innocently enough: a quick reply, a glance at a notification, one email that looks like it might matter. Then a chat badge catches my eye, a tab is still open from earlier, something needs clearing, something else looks interesting, and suddenly I am standing in the middle of my own day wondering where time went.
That is the strange part about modern distraction. It rarely feels dramatic while it is happening. It feels ordinary. A buzz on the phone. A red dot on an app. A message that might need a reply. A scroll that promises to take only a second. Most of it is small enough to justify in the moment, but together it becomes a weather system.
Lately, I have been trying to separate what is asking for my attention from what deserves it.
Noise is the stuff that asks for my attention without earning it. It is the constant stream of alerts, chat notifications, text messages, newsletters I do not remember signing up for, promotional emails pretending to be useful, app badges, algorithmic feeds, and the endless scroll that turns curiosity into a kind of low-grade drift. Noise is not always bad in isolation. Sometimes it is funny, interesting, or even useful. Sometimes it is a person I care about, reaching out for a perfectly good reason. The problem is not that every interruption is worthless. The problem is that everything now arrives with the confidence of something urgent.
Signal is quieter. It is deep work that needs a little room before it opens up. It is an unhurried conversation with someone I love. It is reading something that changes the shape of my thinking. It is being present with my family, making something with my hands, going for a walk, writing, learning, listening, or simply letting my mind be still long enough to notice what I have been carrying.
The signal usually does not shout. That is why I have to protect it.
I grew up on land that could make a person feel both rooted and trapped.
Broken fences, cattle, fields, drought, debt, and family history were not symbols then, they were just the weather of daily life.
Responsibility came early, and it often arrived dressed as fear: something loose in the dark, something broken that had to be fixed, something inherited that nobody asked whether you were strong enough to carry.
The homestead I knew could be beautiful, but it also had a way of making hardship feel holy and silence feel like obedience.
That is the ground this song came from.
Lyrics
39N
The cedar post snapped like a dry-rot bone A gunshot crack in the dark, alone Staples spit out of the wood like teeth Somethin’ wicked waking underneath Miller County line is a razor’s edge I’m bleedin’ out here on a family pledge Fog is rollin’ heavy, the asphalt shines And all I got left just crossed the lines
Now the headlights catch a thousand pounds of fear White-faced heifer standin’ frozen here She looks at me like I’m the one to blame For the mud, the debt, and the rust on my name
Oh, the blacktop calls and the fences fail Every acre here is a coffin nail I’m patchin’ up holes where the money leaked out Chasin’ shadows through a three-year drought Yeah, the Lord gives rain, but the ground holds sin God, I’m losin’ the war on 39N
Tracks in the clay are draggin’ deep Razorbacks wakin’ while the bankers sleep They don’t fear the truck, they don’t fear the shout They know this farm is ragged out Grandaddy swore that the soil was blessed But he put a pistol to his chest Now I’m out here wrestle’n the beast he fed Tryin’ to catch a livin’ amongst the dead
Batteries fadin’ in a heavy hand There ain’t no mercy in a no-man’s land Just the squeal of a boar in the briar patch thick And a heart beatin’ slower than the clock can tick
Repeat Chorus
If I let ‘em go, I lose the farm If I bring ‘em back, I do ‘em harm There’s 18-wheels comin’ round the bend Gonna turn my livestock into wind I close my eyes and I wait for the sound Of everything I worked for… burnin’ down
I am a songwriter and a musician, but I am not the voice meant to inhabit these verses.
I've used AI to bridge the gap for the concept demos, crafted to serve as blueprints that capture the genre, tone, and weary soul I hear for each song.
They exist as an invitation, offered in the hope that these lyrics will eventually reach the hands of an artist and storyteller who can bring them fully into the light.
Until then, they remain as they were born: quiet reflections on the grit and grace found just north of the county line.
If you already trust 1Password with API keys, database passwords, and tokens, your SSH keys are the next obvious secret to get out of ~/.ssh/. The 1Password SSH agent lets OpenSSH and Git use keys stored in your vault instead of private key files on disk, which makes day-to-day Git authentication cleaner without turning your home directory into a small museum of long-lived keys.
The important nuance is this: the op CLI is part of the workflow, but the actual SSH agent is provided by the 1Password desktop app. That matters because it keeps the model honest:
1Password stores the private key item
The desktop app brokers SSH authentication
OpenSSH talks to the 1Password agent
Git keeps using SSH exactly the way it always has
If you are already using 1Password for local development secrets, this is the same idea applied to Git access. The application code stays boring, the SSH client stays boring, and the secret moves into the vault where it belongs. If your main goal is application secrets rather than Git access, the companion post is Use 1Password CLI for Local Development.
If your local development workflow still depends on .env files full of live credentials, you are not doing configuration management, you are just normalizing secret sprawl. The 1Password CLI, op, gives you a better model: keep secrets in a vault, inject them into a child process only when needed, and let your terminal stay fast without turning your laptop into a plaintext key dump.
This post is intentionally about local development only. No CI runners, no GitHub Actions, no Kubernetes side quests. Just a developer workstation, a terminal, and a sane way to run Python, Go, PowerShell, Zsh, and Bash without leaving credentials all over the filesystem.
Recorded Demos
The command and language examples in this post are backed by VHS tapes and a deterministic local demo harness with fake secret values.
That keeps the demos rerenderable without exposing credentials for these examples.
For more than a decade, MkDocs, especially when paired with Material for MkDocs, became the default answer for engineering documentation. It was simple enough for technical writers, familiar to Python-centric platform teams, and polished enough that most organizations never needed to build a documentation frontend of their own. That consensus has now fractured. As of 2026, teams still running MkDocs 1.x are no longer just choosing a mature stack, they're accepting a growing maintenance, compatibility, and software supply chain risk.
MkDocs earned its position because it solved the right problem at the right level of complexity. It gave teams a straightforward content model, a single configuration file, a Python packaging story that fit naturally into existing developer environments, and a clean separation between content, theme, and deployment. Material for MkDocs then raised the ceiling dramatically. Search, dark mode, responsive navigation, blog support, admonitions, tabs, code annotations, and a broad plugin ecosystem turned what began as a documentation generator into a complete publishing stack.
For engineering organizations, that combination was unusually efficient:
Technical writers could stay in Markdown.
Engineers could treat docs like any other Git-based project.
Platform teams could build and deploy sites with the same CI pipelines used elsewhere.
Open-source programs could publish polished public documentation without standing up a custom app.
In practice, MkDocs plus Material became the reference architecture for documentation in many Python-centric and infrastructure-heavy teams. It wasn't the only option, but it was often the least controversial one.
When I need to stand up a quick load balancer for VMware Cloud Foundation Operations in the lab, I don't want to rebuild the same HAProxy configuration by hand every time. I just want a small Debian or Ubuntu VM, a VIP on the right VLAN, a backend pool of appliance nodes, and a fast path to getting the service online.
This helper script is what I use for that job. It prompts for the virtual IP, netmask, redirect FQDN, and backend node IPs, then wires up the network interface, installs HAProxy, generates a fresh configuration, and restarts the required services. It is intentionally opinionated, which is exactly why it's useful in a home lab.
When a Terraform provider repository ships Markdown documentation full of example configuration, those snippets are part of the product. If they drift out of style, or worse, stop parsing as valid HCL, users feel it immediately. terrafmt is a small tool that helps keep embedded Terraform examples formatted and syntactically correct in both local workflows and CI.
terrafmt scans files for embedded Terraform configuration, extracts the matching blocks, parses the HCL, formats it, and then either shows the diff or rewrites the file in place. It recognizes embedded configuration in a few very practical forms:
Markdown documentation files with fenced hcl, terraform, or tf blocks
Go source files that return raw strings
Go source files that build examples with fmt.Sprintf(...)
In other words, terrafmt is a bridge between "this is documentation" and "this is still code."
I learned to work a gearbox with my heels off the floor On an ole Massey growlin’ for more Back pasture buzzin’ like a hornet’s nest in June Daddy said, “Don’t force her, boy, she’ll give up too soon” Watched his knuckles, white against the grit and grease Fightin’ back a mean streak that wouldn't let him find no peace By the time I was sixteen, I'd traded the field for the load And a seventy-nine Chevy on a washboard county road
It was two-tone rust and a bench seat ride That orange and white seventy-nine Haulin’ secrets past the county line With a payload heavier than the trash on the side Every mile was a warnin’, every mile was a lie In the hollowed-out stare of a blood-relation eye I learned how to steer, and I learned how to bleed In that orange and white, I found the wreck of me
Hot vinyl stickin’ to the back of my neck Radio fightin' static and a Jackson tune The smell of sulfur and a burnin' belt Silence chokin' out the cab too soon I gripped that wheel while he held back a flood He just stared straight ahead with the iron in his blood Said, “There was a life before this one, son” And I pointed that chrome, toward a darker run
Didn’t ask for a name, didn’t ask him why Didn’t need to know where the truth went to die I backed off the gas, let the engine moan It’s a heavy-ass load when you’re drivin’ alone
Repeat Chorus
Some miles you drive And some you just drag Still haulin’ the weight Past the county road lines In the orange and white Yeah, that '79
I am a songwriter and a musician, but I am not the voice meant to inhabit these verses.
I've used AI to bridge the gap for the concept demos, crafted to serve as blueprints that capture the genre, tone, and weary soul I hear for each song.
They exist as an invitation, offered in the hope that these lyrics will eventually reach the hands of an artist and storyteller who can bring them fully into the light.
Until then, they remain as they were born: quiet reflections on the grit and grace found just north of the county line.
In VMware Cloud Foundation 9, the certificate workflow in VMware Cloud Foundation Operations ("VCF Operations") can make ESX certificate replacement look more constrained than it is.
When generating a CSR for an ESX host, the interface may show 2048 as the only RSA key size available. In an environment where server certificates must use 3072 or 4096 bit keys, that can look like a mismatch between the platform and the security baseline.
The important detail is where the CSR gets its key size. For ESX hosts, CSR generation can use the host's advanced certificate key size setting, even when VCF Operations only displays 2048.
So the question is not only what the dialog shows. It is what the ESX host is configured to use when the CSR is created.
