A great challenge or a great education?

When I started laying out the plan for what now is LRSB.org and all the parts in the machine for it I was quite overwhelmed. One of the main questions I posed myself was: "What do I even want?". Slowly but surely it all came to fruition.

I wanted LRSB to be a place I was looking for when I was younger, but how would I do that? First of all: what was it that I was looking for when I was younger: servers, learning tools, a playground or something else? I quickly realized that I what I was looking for back then was quite simple; a free way to enter the current tech space. Not that long ago it was the time of virtualization, just before the brink of containerization. When I look back on it, the past seemed so easy, one application; one virtual machine. But how does that look in the current day and age?

Nowadays DevOps or DevSecOps are the new buzzwords ruling the land of development. It seems GitHub nowadays is the standard, in general, getting started with versioning using any sort of Git forge is a great asset to have in your IT skill set. Quickly I realized that my teen self was quite afraid of using a platform like GitHub, being a youngster, posting your code open for the world to see; it almost felt like sharing a diary with the world. I always wanted to work in my own little private space, where no one really saw the results of my actions until I felt comfortable releasing them; and as such the LRSB Forge was built.

But what about GitHub Actions? Well, turns out, there's a solution for that! The LRSB Forge runs on Forgejo and it so happens to have what's called Forgejo Actions; without another look I added a two new servers to the fleet and made them dedicated runners.

But tying it all together, boy, that was the real challenge. Things like Single-Sign-On (SSO) were things I personally didn't really have a whole lot of experience with. However convinced of wanting to build my space I set to work and lo and behold: it's there. The sheer amazement I had the first time it all worked really made me realize what I was working for: giving other people that exact feeling.

So here we are, a few weeks later, it's all running. Often I can just stare at the status page, enjoying the green boxes light up every 30 seconds. It's all tied together, it all works, but in the end I'm sure the machine will grind to a halt sometime, somewhere. I would like to invite you to join me on exploring your creativity and maybe learn a new skill or two. As much as I'd like to say, e-mail me and let's get you setup on the Forge, anything works; IT-skills aren't the only thing out there to learn at the end of the day!