Fresh/Brewed

OpenObserve

Thu, 16 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0500

I found out a person from a developer portal company I was looking into had recently moved to OpenObserve. I was chatting with them on LinkedIn about other topics but figured I should really give OpenObserve a look as I’ve often looked at Observability tools, small and large, over the years.

Company

OpenObserve is a relative up and comer started in 2022 by Prabhat Sharma as ZincSearch before pivoting to Observability. Its still relatively small with an estimated 11-50 employees and based in Menlo Park, CA. That said, it’s recently closed some Series A in April with Nexus Venture Partners and Dell Tech Capital so perhaps it’s poised to grow.

Ratatui (and VHS)

Tue, 14 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0500

Of all places, I found Ratatui from a post on Threads. It’s basically a really light fast Rust-based Terminal User Interface (TUI).

It has some VHS examples as well. I haven’t used VHS before so let’s see what that is about as we build out our own TUI using the framework with Google Antigravity.

Ratatui

Let’s start by cloning the GIT repo

I realized my local rust environment was way out of date

$ cargo version
cargo 1.74.0 (ecb9851af 2023-10-18)

so i did a brew install rust to update it to current.

Zed Editor

Thu, 09 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0500

I had a note to circle back on Zed. I had looked nearly a year go in August 2025 at their preview feature for AI. At the time, Windows wasn’t there (only via Scoop). I also was far more tied to VS Code so I wasn’t really looking at Zed as a possible replacement.

Times have changed, and Zed has advanced quite a lot. So let’s give it another go and this time I’ll be looking at it as a real possible replacement for VS Code (especially as my primary machines are all now Linux based).

Home Lab Updates

Tue, 07 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0500

In moving our primary blogging system from Github over to a self hosted Gitea, we need to sort out how to best create a proper HA DR environment. This means having some push mirrors. The first thing I did when i setup Gitea to be the “real” repo for this blog was to mirror it to Forgejo. However that instance is on the same cluster, so if there is a catastrophic outage, then I would expect both to be down and have to rely on whatever my last local clone happens to be.

Let's make an MCP Server and Skill!

Mon, 06 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0500

Let’s Make and MCP Server (And Skill)!

MCP servers are fundamentally tool-providers to our Agentic Gen AI tools and provide a robust vendor-agnostic solution to building and sharing custom tooling to the overall Open Source community.

And making one is not as hard as some might think. Today we’ll explore making an MCP server as well as a Skill and hosting them both locally and in GCP. We’ll cover usage patterns and wrap with costs and next steps.

Congrats. You're suspended.

Thu, 02 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0500

Congratulations! You have been flagged for something.

Who knows exactly, but you soon are clued in that something is amiss when your gcloud commands began to fail

$ gcloud dns --project=myanthosproject2 record-sets list --zone="steepedicu"
ERROR: (gcloud.dns.record-sets.list) PERMISSION_DENIED: Permission denied: Consumer 'projects/myanthosproject2' has been suspended. This command is authenticated as isaac.johnson@gmail.com which is the active account specified by the [core/account] property.
Permission denied: Consumer 'projects/myanthosproject2' has been suspended.
- '@type': type.googleapis.com/google.rpc.ErrorInfo
  domain: googleapis.com
  metadata:
    consumer: projects/511842454269
    containerInfo: projects/myanthosproject2
    service: dns
  reason: CONSUMER_SUSPENDED

You then notice that AI apps cannot use Vertex anymore

Don't Freak Out.

Tue, 30 Jun 2026 00:00:00 -0500

I have been rocking a Jekyll blog now since around 2021. This blogging site started out in 2019 using Ghost which I automated back then with Azure DevOps.

Over all this time, I have written over 500 posts and just the CICD updates, for which I have optimized as best i can are 16 to 25 minutes long. The blogs Github repo is nearly 25Gb expanded!

I’ll admit that I am a data hoarder (my wife may just scratch out the word “data” there). I have a hard time purging anything. I have a box of Palm pilots, Windows XP tablet PCs and a working MiniDisc recorder (I will never give it up).

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Courses

I created a Udemy course on Open Telemetry here

For the month of July 2026 you can use this code for 50% of ($10 instead of $20): 9D9D6DBB930651C3CC61

Presentations

May 2026 : “Let’s build an MCP Server (and Skills!)”, presented at OpenSourceNorth : YouTube
May 2026 : “Vertex AI and n8n, low-code workflows, now served at home!”, presented at GDG Brunei: YouTube
March 2025: “NUG25 Otel NR Ai Tooling with Gemini CLI and Qwen Coder”, presented at NUG 2025L YouTube

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

About Me

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

About Me

Isaac is a Cloud Solutions Architect and DevOps/SRE Architect who focuses on cloud migrations and DevOps + SRE processes. He also is a dad to three wonderful daughters (hence the references to Princess King sprinkled throughout the blog).

With a background as a Cloud and SRE Architect, I have a passion for process and building out scalable solutions. My career has spanned over 20 years experience, and I’ve had the honor of working at local companies such as Medtronic, Abbott, Thomson Reuters, and CH Robinson with a focus on SRE, DevOps and Cloud Migrations. Today, as a Senior Staff Cloud Architect at Abbott (SJM) in the Structured Heart division, my focus is on transcatheter aortic valve implantation (TAVI) next generation solutions. I live in Woodbury, MN and enjoy camping, canoeing and fishing with three wonderful daughters.

Posts Archive

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000