Balthazar Rouberol

Yesterday, I ran a remote interview for a Senior SRE position.

I was pleasantly surprised to learn that PARADISO had just open-sourced their tabletop sound mixer project, called tat.

AI scrapers have found my personal forge and have started to scrape it at the rate of several requests per second.

I've grown tired of using make over the years.

I recently learned that it was possible to configure git to push to several remotes at once.

I wanted to be able to quickly make note of someone's birthday without having to know their year of birth, and still get a yearly reminder to wish them happy birthday.

I'm going to set sails to the Dark Carribean and GM a couple of Pirate Borg games for friend and family during the holiday season.

I've run The Hauting of Ypsilon 14 twice now.

Writing Helm charts somehow feels like a gigantic step backwards.

When you're working with Kubernetes, you oftentimes find yourself overlaying many different YAML value files: the chart defaults values, your environmental values, your datacenter-specific overrides, your instance-specific overrides, etc, each of these fi…

Leaving Github has been on my mind for a while, as the service has fully entered its enshittification phase.

I recently found myself actively staying as away as possible from sites relying on infinite scroll to keep you hooked up, such as YouTube or Reddit.

Games Youtube channels Actual Plays I've been playing TTRPGs for years, and have grown more and more tired of playing Dungeons and Dragons.

I've been running Phandelver and Below: The Shattered Obelisk for a while now, and my players have made it to the final chapter, bringing them to The Far Realm.

I'm excited to be GM-ing The Haunting of Ypsilon 14 Mothership 1E module for a group of friends in a couple of weeks.

My new ISP provided router does not allow me to change the advertised DNS server IP.

Whenever I set on building myself a new tool, I get unreasonably excited, because it means that I get to practice my craft of problem-solving through writing code to scratch an itch.

I was recently writing a caching decorator for a recent project, that would allow me to cache the result of a given function or method into a cache singleton, which content is then serialized to disk when the CLI exits.

I've recently had to debug why a program in charge of regularly dumping the Wikimedia wikis data would simply... stop, without any prior knowledge of this (rather large) codebase.

I recently stumbled upon the Giant Book of Battle Mats, which is a book of A3 laminated TTRPG battlemaps.

One of my favourite aspect of being a dungeon master is building my own tools.

Over the years, I have developed a bit of a love-hate relationship with make.

The project I'm currrently working on only has a single external dependency: SQLite, with full text search enabled.

I have been experimenting with FastAPI recently, a Python API framework self-describing as "high performance, easy to learn, fast to code, ready for production".

Sometimes, a pull request is ready to go, but shouldn't be merged before some other changes are merged first.

Whenever I'm baking pizzas, the first step is always to remember the dough recipe, and adjust for the number of pies I'm making.

I recently found the 3 Lord of the Rings audiobooks I bought from Phil Dragash some years back, as I was digging through my NAS.

I have been toying with the idea of generating visually pleasing maps centered on a given address, to have them printed and framed.

I have recently acquired two solar panels from Sunology advertising a cumulated instantaneous production of up to 810W.

I have recently published an article on the Alan tech blog walking the reader through how we have reduced the runtime of our longest nightly job from 21 hours to about 8 minutes, by using simple profiling and SQLAlchemy optimizations.

Getting started Reacting to key presses Sending structured data from the keypad Playing sounds after a keypress Let's rub some web on it The finishing touch Demo time I have the hardware!

I left Datadog 2 weeks ago, after 5 intense and incredible years.

After having faced a couple of of regressions in bo (my personal text editor written in Rust) in the past couple of days, I have tried to increase the number of unit tests related to the codebase sections handling navigation.

Software engineers sometimes have a reputation of being overly critical when it comes to tools and programming languages.

Given the fact that running a Datadog agent on a Synology Play NAS is not obvious, I wanted to enable Discord webhooks push notifications (as this is where my Datadog alerts are already being sent).

water level (m) over time Last month, Ardèche experienced very heavy precipitations in the span of couple of hours.

I've recently designed a 2 session long (6h) detour into the Underdark, that would feed into one of my player's character's backstory.

If you have been following my Essential Tools and Practices for the Aspiring Software Developer posts and were anxious to read more, you might have noticed that they stopped coming after a while.

I have spent quite a lot of time using Dungeondraft recently, as I've designed many homebrewed places and encounters.

When I was preparing for Port Nyanzaru, in Tomb of Annihilation, I started reading what other Dungeons Masters had to say about the city.

This article is part of a self-published book project by Balthazar Rouberol and Etienne Brodu, ex-roommates, friends and colleagues, aiming at empowering the up and coming generation of developers.

This article is part of a self-published book project by Balthazar Rouberol and Etienne Brodu, ex-roommates, friends and colleagues, aiming at empowering the up and coming generation of developers.

This article is part of a self-published book project by Balthazar Rouberol and Etienne Brodu, ex-roommates, friends and colleagues, aiming at empowering the up and coming generation of developers.

If you're reading this, do yourself a favor.

This article is part of a self-published book project by Balthazar Rouberol and Etienne Brodu, ex-roommates, friends and colleagues, aiming at empowering the up and coming generation of developers.

This article is part of a self-published book project by Balthazar Rouberol and Etienne Brodu, ex-roommates, friends and colleagues, aiming at empowering the up and coming generation of developers.

My work takes me to the United-States multiple times a year, and I've never been comfortable using the hotel Wi-Fi, or even my company VPN for that matter, when I'm there.

You know how everyone wants their proposal to be special, thoughtful, original, and above all, wants to avoid being cliché?

I have been feeling more and more burdened in the recent months.

I recently realized that I was routinely managing thousands of servers and petabytes of data in my daily job, but was still managing my own personal infrastructure like I was living in 1999.