#183

Mar 20, 2022

Work

Week 2 of GoCardless. I started writing code this week; just some fairly simple refactoring and configuration changes, but it was nice to start to get hands-on. I’m definitely not the sort of person who likes to spend weeks just reading documentation or pairing before starting to do some independent productive work.

If you take reddit as gospel, you’d think that it takes 6+ months for someone to start to be able to independently contribute, which feels insane to me. If anything, I’d have preferred to start even sooner, last week rather than this.

I did still have a bunch of things to read, and onboarding sessions to go to, and of course I’m still lacking a lot of domain knowledge, but I’m getting there.

Books

This week I read:

resolved

I got there: I’m using my DNS server for my LAN DNS: it’s acting as an authoritative nameserver for the lan. domain, under which I have all my other hosts (like nyarlathotep.lan. and nas.lan.), and recursively resolving other queries. This is very cool.

Of course, after actually switching over to it for real, I found some bugs. The worst two were excessive copying of DNS blocklists (kind of bad when the blocklist I use has 99,000+ entries) and a weird inability to resolve domains where Cloudflare is the authoritative DNS.

But those are fixed now, and I’ve implemented a bunch of other improvements too.

This week I merged the following exciting PRs:

And the following less exciting PRs:

And opened several issues, all but one of which have already been closed:

So it’s been a pretty productive week! And it’s certainly very cool to be running my own DNS server in my LAN. There are still issues to resolve, and RFCs to implement, but I could stop now and this would already be more than good enough.

This project has definitely been a good learning experience. DNS is a huge eventually-consistent distributed database based on a hierarchical web of trust, but it isn’t actually that complex. I’m planning to write a “how DNS works” memo soon, before I start to forget all the little details.