Today I opened up a term on my work laptop and I found the code for grimmly which I’d worked on some time ago just sitting there, because I’d been chewing someone’s ear off about it some time last week. I tend to leave tmux panes open for weeks.

I haven’t been using it for a while, so I thought I’d fire it up again. I went in to the appropriate directory on my vps and ran make run. I went in to my weechat and did /script load grimmly. Then I went in to my working SSL dir on my vps and ran make, which prompted me for a client machine friendly name and about a million fields and repeats of passwords (totally arbitrary information that I should probably get around to automating somewhen). Finally it spat out a .p12 file which I downloaded and imported in to my keychain on my local machine.

And it all works flawlessly. I’m pretty chuffed with past me (usually that guy’s a bastard), because he decided on a useful thing to do and did it in a cool way that’s an amalgamation of different knowledges:

  • clojure
  • python
  • weechat
  • HTTP
  • SSL and SSL client certificates
  • nginx
  • docker containers and container networks
  • shitloads of Makefile

My favourite thing about it is that it’s very unixy - lots of bits that are good at their jobs plug in together to make something that’s simple, fast, effective and composeable.

On top of that, it’s a love song to the esoteric way in which I always end up doing things, which now at the age of 30 I suppose I should only embrace (because it’s unlikely to change). I moulded a thing around my workflow so that I could remain in total control - the way technology is supposed to be.