AJ's Blog

Elasticsearch

Elasticsearch is a distributed, RESTful search and analytics engine designed for scalability and flexibility. It allows you to store, search, and analyze large volumes of data quickly and efficiently. Elasticsearch is part of the Elastic Stack. This is a powerful platform that has many strengths when most of your data is text based and you may need to search for text. It supports horizontal scaling and stores data in an Index. You can have data replicated into shards to achieve High Availability.

Parsing workout data from Hevy on iOS

While I was writing the post about parsing data from the strong app on iOS, I stopped using this app. Now that I have this historical data there are a few approaches but as someone who is busy I ended up using another iOS app that has a native app for the apple watch. It also directly imported all my workout history so stay tuned as I will next be taking a look at any differences in that data.

Prometheus

Organizations rely heavily on metrics to ensure their applications are running smoothly, efficiently, and securely. One of the leading tools in this space is Prometheus , an open-source system designed for event monitoring and alerting. This blog post will delve into what Prometheus is, how it works with metrics, and why it’s become a staple in modern infrastructure management. It may be overkill for a homelab but it is actually a simple system that scales well. You can start by monitoring no more than a single system and/or application and scale to hundreds or more. Metrics are the core of any monitoring system. They provide quantitative data about various aspects of your systems and applications, such as performance, resource usage, error rates, and more. Prometheus collects these metrics from configured targets at specified intervals.

Grafana Loki v2 to v3 upgrade

Just a quick post to upgrade Grafana Loki to v3. If you are not familiar with this project, it is an open-source system for aggregating application, system, and other log files for querying and potentially configuring alert notifications when something goes wrong. Check out a previous post where I set up Loki in my homelab.

step 1: update to latest minor release of 2.x

First if you are already running a Grafana Loki deployment, upgrade to the latest minor revision of version 2.x.

Parsing workout data from strong app on iOS

I use a mobile iOS app on my iPhone and Apple watch to record my workout sessions at the gym. I thought of this little project to encourage me to practice with some Python and SQL with data that I actually care about.

This mobile app allows you to export data from previous workouts in a CSV file. You could import that file to a spreadsheet but I’m going to import it to a Postgresql database and run a few queries.

Homelab, 2025 plans

A new calendar year is already underway. My plans for the next year include projects related to what I am working on at my job.

• I will be reviewing my observability stack and taking a look at OpenTelemetry.
• I will also be testing some CI/CD tools.
• I think I will be overhauling my kubernetes environment again. I want something more simple but also maintain the goal of combining the resources of many low-power computers such as Raspberry Pi, Mac Mini, and small form factor desktop PCs.
• I will be trying to practice more software projects most likely in Python as that is one language with a large library my team maintains at work. I would like to learn some more full stack development with JavaScript or TypeScript. I have seen a lot of applications in my career that use this as a language for the entire application stack or most of it.

Lab infrastructure

At the start of 2025, here is how the structure of my homelab looks: