I’ve been taking a look at InluxData’s TICK stack and figuring out some ESP8266 chips that I recently purchased. I always like to come up with practical projects to do when I’m learning about some new tech. When my dad came to me asking me to keep an eye on the temperature of his house while he was out of town, I knew exactly what I needed to build. It got even better when he told me his plan.

Proxmox uses LXC containers rather than the more commonly heard of Docker containers. LXC containers can be thought of as very lightweight virtual machines. LXC containers can be customized to run an application but typically their images are for linux operating systems. Adding a template There are two methods for adding an LXC container template to Proxmox. The first is very convenient but requires Proxmox to be connected to the internet.

Using the Proxmox server I set up to run a Windows virtual machine would let me move away from dual booting on my main machine. I boot into Windows maybe twice a year so there won’t be much that I miss. A remote connection from my desktop (or another machine) will more than cover my occasional use case for Windows. Creating a virtual machine in Proxmox is straightforward for anyone who has worked with virtual machines before.

Proxmox is an operating system that makes it easy to manage virtual machines and LXC containers. The server uses a web GUI for easy access and handles all of the resource management from within the GUI. For the most part, installing Proxmox is as straightforward as installing any OS. I ran into some issues with the networking and screen configurations that took me a little time to troubleshoot. Both were easily fixed by making sure the correct hardware was plugged into my system before starting to install.

Exercise 2 of Gophercises was to create a URL shortener. The framework for this code was given and the student needed to fill in the missing pieces. The solution of the main problem is given but no solutions are given for the bonus challenges. This is my solution to the main problem along with the bonus challenges in which a solution was not given. The main goal of this exercise was to get familiar working with different markup languages in Go.

After learning about the new Go language, I immediately wanted to try creating something with it. I started a web app and learned about the Gin framework. While the router in the Go standard library is nice, Gin adds a few nice to haves and as well as a performance boost. When I started adding a user system to the app, I knew I wanted users to be able to sign in with OAuth.