What a year, huh? (2023 Recap)

This time, I'm not writing about something techy (well, mostly), or a project. This time, it's more of a personal update. 2023 has been a pretty eventful year for me, and even though I haven't really done that in the past, and I'm not sure how interesting this will be for anyone except myself, I thought it was worth commemorating the milestones that happened in the past year on my own little corner of the World Wide Web.

Implementing support for message retention policies in Matrix

As part of my work in the Matrix core team, I got to implement an actively requested feature, i.e. support for message retention policies, in Synapse (the reference Matrix homeserver implementation). In this post, I give you a peek at what the feature does, how it works, and how it's currently implemented in Synapse.

Install Party 1.0

A few weeks ago, I attended Ubucon Europe in Sintra with two of my colleagues from the Matrix core team. One of the workshops we hosted there was about getting the attendees to install their own Matrix homeserver. While trying to figure out how to set it up so that everyone ends up with a working and federating homeserver, we had the idea of an automated tool to create servers dedicated to these kinds of events. This is how my last personal project, Install Party, was born, and it's now getting its 1.0 release!

Make your own Google Drive+Docs with Nextcloud, Collabora Online and object storage

As someone who values privacy (mine and others'), I usually try to find new ways of getting rid of the now infamous GAFAM and their friends, the biggest of them all being Google. Among every Google service, there's one that is hugely used among both individuals and organisations, which is Google Docs. Add to that the whole storage service they also provide, and you get Google Drive, the best way to directly feed Google with all your files and data, including personal and administrative documents, music collections, photos from your smartphone... Because I don't want to share that huge amount of data with Google, I've set up my own Google Drive+Docs using mainly self-hosted free software projects, including Nextcloud, Caddy and (Docker-less) Collabora Online.

Random tools #1

Over time, I came to encounter a few tools, addressing different use cases and/or issues. Recently, I started listing these tools in order to share some of them with you, whether you already know them or not, in smaller posts like this one, without going too much in depth with them. Welcome to the first episode of "Random tools"!

Making party time

A month ago today, the first edition of immersion{s}, a new events brand mainly focused on trance parties in Brest (Brittany), happened. Organising an event isn't an easy task, and that's even more relevant when it's your first one. It took us over 6 months of hard work to make this one happen, and I'm not even counting all the previous failed attemps. During all that time, up to the few hours after the party ended, we've learned a lot on a lot of topics we sometimes didn't even expect to have to deal with, and this new knowledge is what I'd like to share with you this week.

Manage your passwords with pass

Let's talk about passwords. Basically, that's the things you're supposed to keep different for each account you have on the Internet. Either you don't do it, do it partially, or have a password manager do it for you. This week, I'm writing about pass, a simple and minimal password manager mainly consisting in a 699-line long bash script, which I've been using for some months.

Enter the Matrix

Matrix is a protocol for decentralised, federated and secure communications, created and maintained by New Vector, a company split between London, UK and Rennes, France. It's based on RESTful HTTP/JSON APIs, documented in open specifications, and is designed to be usable for anything that requires real-time-ish communications, from instant messaging to IoT. Let's see how it works and how to make a basic use of it.

Centralising logs with rsyslog and parsing them with Graylog extractors

Logs are really useful for a lot of things, from investigating issues to monitoring stuff that can't be watched efficiently by other monitoring tools. When it comes to storing them, a lot of solutions are available, depending on what you need. At CozyCloud, our main need was to be able to store them somewhere safe, and process them. Let me walk you through how we did it.

Grafana Dashboards Manager

I'm sort of in charge of all things monitoring currently at CozyCloud. Some of it is done using Zabbix (I already wrote about that), and the other part is pushed to OVH Metrics and visualised through Grafana. When I was alone working on dashboards and graphs, it was all right, but once a colleague came in, we felt the lack of version control would cause great troubles. That's where the Grafana Dashboards Manager comes in to save the day.

One post a week

When I was at BreizhCamp, a 3-day long tech conference in the West of France that happened a couple of weeks ago, I attended a talk that gave me the idea to share each week on this blog some new stuff I learned on the way.