I want to document for myself and for anyone who might be interested (probably mostly me, but maybe a prospective employer will find this interesting) the current state of my personal ecosystem of software, devops, and what I consider state of the art within my personal projects. This article is primarily concerned with ops, but will touch on aspects of software development too.

I will have to divide this up into major bits. I build a lot of stuff for myself, just in dribs and drabs of spare time I steal from when I probably ought to be sleeping or playing video games. So, this is a list of what I have going and how I make it go. Let’s start by listing the products themselves. Then, I’ll describe the overall architecture of my system. Finally, I’ll break down how each project fits into that architecture.

I am struggling to come up with a witty introduction to this topic, so let me just start by telling the origin story. Several years ago, I added some tooling to help me manage secrets related to my dotfiles. The first incarnation was a simple .netrc type solution where I stored the secrets in plain text in files that only my user could read. I added some scripts to help reading and managing these a bit. Over time this evolved into a complex system that allowed me to pull down secrets from my online password vault and store them in a local encrypted Keepass database. This created a new problem: every time a script used a secret, I needed to enter a password. Eventually, I added a small password service to help keep track of the key used to unlock the various password stores so I wouldn’t have to type the password every time.¹