Automation on Neil Hanlon

What Does Fedora Want From Me Today?

Tue, 14 Jul 2026 13:54:48 -0400

I began contributing as a packager with Fedora a few years ago, in concert with my participation in founding and bootstrapping Rocky Linux from the ground up. That alone deserves a blog post series I may write some day… but more to the point… I haven’t done a great job of maintaining my packages. There’s a host of reasons I could get into for why, but particularly in light of having a newborn and therefore much more limited time and energy than I ever thought was possible, optimizing my workflows and maximizing my impact (and reducing ownership of things where needed) are the most powerful knobs I can use to make the greatest difference not just in Fedora but across all the things I involve myself with.

I Put My Son in a Swamp

Sat, 11 Jul 2026 00:45:00 -0400

My son is a typed resource now. He has a sync method that pulls the last seven days of his life into a versioned snapshot, a stack of reports that summarize how he slept and ate, and — I did think about this — a delete that’s careful to be idempotent, because deleting the same diaper twice shouldn’t be an error.

I did not set out to put a baby in a swamp. It followed, the way these things do, from having already put everything else in one.

The WiFi Certificate That Didn't Exist an Hour Ago

Fri, 10 Jul 2026 18:30:00 -0400

My laptop is on WiFi right now on a certificate that didn’t exist an hour ago. I made the keypair, my own CA signed it, the private key went into my secret store, and the machine authenticated onto the 802.1X network and pulled a DHCP lease — all through code I’d finished writing about twenty minutes earlier. I want to talk about the boring part that made it safe, because the boring part is the only part I’d defend.