October 2024
Hello, welcome to the next monthly log!
The certification website is still mostly done. I was able to gather some necessary information for setting up transactional emails. I also reprovisioned the server with ZFS so it could get added to the existing Haskell Infrastructure system backup scheme. In less technical terms, I laid the groundwork for one of the surprisingly-most-difficult features of any site, and enabled one of the surprisingly-most-overlooked reliability features as well.
Outside of purely technical work, I went to the GSoC summit, and it was a great experience! I discovered it’s effectively an open source unconference where every attendee happens to be a maintainer of some project. I also got to see (the outside of) a room that is officially labeled an “SRE Panic Room”, which I think is amusing and endearing.
Another attendee and I ran a session on CI, which ended up being a success. Too many CI engineers toil in darkness, down in the s**t mines, unaware that others are facing the same issues basically everywhere. There was some good information-sharing and emotional release. 
Shortly afterward, on the same whirlwind trip, I went to MuniHac. While there I successfully figured out what’s going on with random’s API, although I still find it hard to use. (I have a draft of a blog post about that. But I don’t have a blog, so…) Of course I also got to see a bunch of friends and have a good time talking about Haskell!
In less cheerful news, nobody besides me has contributed any code to the FreeBSD CI experiment. That means there is still no FreeBSD CI for GHC. Consequently, there are no bugfixes for the platform. The GHC team is a tightly-constrained community resource, and the lack of wider interest in FreeBSD means they should not put their own time into it while other priorities exist. I personally only know of 2 people who have expressed any concern for FreeBSD. (Surely there are more out there?) One of them is GHCup’s maintainer. GHCup considers missing FreeBSD support a blocker, and won’t update its ‘recommended’ version beyond GHC 9.4 until certain bugfixes are applied. So, if you like modern Haskell and you use FreeBSD, please consider contributing in some form or another!
November plans
In the short term, I don’t have any other development projects lined up after the certification service, so I plan to return to Stackage and follow up on some outstanding reliability concerns I have.
Plan for the role
Back in June, I wrote that I would continue in this one-day-a-week role at least through September. Now that it’s nearly November, I think it’s time for an update on that plan. 
Personally, I continue to be busy with intensive Finnish courses; I’ve done two in two months, and November and December will be filled with the final two. Adjusting to that routine took time. Coupled with the work I’ve done to clear a backlog of not-Haskell projects, I’ve been slow to look for and find other work. I will be doing more of that in November.
Overall I am less optimistic about finding contract work to augment this DevOps role. Therefore the work I am doing to improve reliability is geared towards setting up a successor and/or an all-volunteer infrastructure team for success. A systems thinker knows to “hope for the best and plan for the worst.” The market continues to be tough. There is less money for non-profits across the board. I’ve heard that GNOME, KDE, Python, and other well-established foundations are struggling with reduced sponsorships and increased costs. I do, however, hope to continue doing this work well into the future! There are still a number of avenues to pursue. Time will tell.
