The occasional ramblings of a software engineer, dad of 3, cycling-mad drinker of tea!
Hi, I’m Edd Grant — a software engineer based in London. This is my little corner of the web, where I write the occasional blog post on things that interest me, usually where I think there may be some benefit to sharing.
Shortly after upgrading my workstation to Ubuntu 26.04 LTS, I noticed that my KeePassXC SSH agent integration had quietly stopped behaving the way it used to. The keys I store in KeePassXC, which I use in conjunction with git and SSH, were no longer being loaded and unloaded as I unlocked and locked its databases, so this was something I wanted to get to the bottom of.
Back in January 2025 I wrote about influxdb-weather-ingestor, a small Kotlin application I built to capture outdoor temperature data and send it to InfluxDB. At the time it was a fairly straightforward Micronaut app that pulled data from the Meteomatics weather API, looked up coordinates via postcodes.io, and wrote the results to InfluxDB on a schedule.
If you’ve been running an Ubuntu server for a while, especially one that was set up a few years ago, there’s a good chance you’ve encountered the dreaded “no space left on device” error when trying to install a kernel update. This is almost always because your /boot partition is too small.
I recently migrated my UniFi-based networking setup over to a Cloud Gateway Max (UCG-Max). The whole thing took about an hour, which included a couple of minutes of internet downtime. Despite being a bit anxious about what might go wrong, I found it surprisingly simple.
I’ve always wanted more visibility into what our Intergas boiler is actually doing. When is the burner firing? What’s the flow temperature? Is the pump running? How’s the water pressure looking? The boiler’s built-in display shows some of this, but I wanted historical data I could graph and correlate with the indoor temperature data I already capture from our Honeywell Evohome system.
Check out my income tools — a collection of calculators for UK tax, salary, and dividends.