It's been a minute 

So, turns out, I haven’t posted in like 5 years. I’ve had some interesting things going on recently, so I thought I’d dump them here for posterity. Some will be useful for me to find later, when inevitably I forget what I fixed to make Time Machine backups work reliably again. Some Most will be useful for no one.

• About 6 months ago, I left my job. I’d been at it for nearly 8 years (after doing my previous gig for nearly 12), and I was just out of gas. My nervous system was basically in perma-“fight or flight” mode, and it was impacting me in ways I noticed (i.e. I was sleeping even less than I normally do), and I’m sure impacting me in ways I wasn’t noticing. It was a pretty big life decision, which my family was incredibly supportive of, as it’s given us lots more time together.
• It’s also given me time to build a shed. I mean, who doesn’t want to build a shed?
• I’ve also used some of the time I’ve had to dig into some technologies a bit deeper than I could day-to-day at the job. I’ve been building toy apps in Claude Code, which have been great for me to learn from (particularly iOS development, which has not been something I’ve spent a lot of my own time on), but also to build out loads of automations for my computer to make my life easier. I think that’s been a pretty big unlock for me—taking some process that used to take lots of steps and loading it up as a Shortcut, or AppleScript, or some automation that now takes less steps. Claude (and, presumably, the other coding tools) are very very good at that.
• One of the things I was playing with was trying to see how far I could get replacing Docker with Apple’s native container. Some stuff worked out of the box, but some other stuff I used (like nearly anything related to Docker Compose) did not. But, it’s been fun to toy around with it to see how far these native containers have come.
• Interestingly, from that experimentation, I learned a hard lesson. Shortly after I started playing with Container, I started having massive problems with Time Machine finishing backups. This was happening both locally and to my NAS backup. It would get about midway through, and then time out and restart. After a while, I finally pumped the logs and some other ephemera into Claude, and Claude helped me pinpoint the issue: the container snapshots that get downloaded for Container to leverage are sparse volumes, and they’re basically all 512GB volumes. Time Machine sees those as 512GB and parses through them, even though they’re actually tiny (maybe just a few MB) on disk. Excluding the snapshot directory for Containers (or, really, the whole directory ~/Library/Application\ Support/com.apple.container/) fixed the backups back to their normal, working state.
• I’ve gotten super into the UK show Taskmaster(I know, late to the party) and have worked my way up to Series 11. It is really quite good.