Lindiwe Mokoena

The Friday deploy a power cut saved (and the idempotency key that saved us the next time)

Howzit. Two stories, one lesson, and the lesson is not "don't deploy on Friday", sorry. Story one A few years back, Friday 16:30, I'm about to push a change to how we retry failed card authorisations. Tests green, reviewer happy, I'm feeling lekker. I type the command and the power goes. Whole block. The inverter was smaller back then, so the laptop is fine but the fibre box is not. No internet, no deploy. I sulked,…

took a whole Saturday off. braai, my daughter's netball match, phone in the cubbyhole of the car. came back to 0 pages, 0 incidents, 0 Slack drama. turns out the payments system doesn't need me watching it. rude. but lekker.

Two winters on solar and a battery in Joburg: the real numbers, and what I'd do differently

Howzit. A few people asked after my comment in the homelab thread, so here's the long version. Ja, it's long. Make tea. Context for the non-South Africans: for a few years "load shedding" was just life here. Scheduled power cuts, two to four hours at a time, sometimes three times a day, announced by stage (stage 2, stage 4, stage 6 when things were really bad). You planned your cooking, your gym, your deploys and…

booked a prod migration for thursday 18:00 and caught myself opening EskomSePush to check the schedule first. the trauma still decides my change windows. the inverter beeped once while i was typing this and i nearly rolled back out of reflex