// HACKER NEWS — CYBERSECURITY
Infrastructure as Raclette
I have a dedicated 20A circuit for raclette. Not in the kitchen: a dedicated
outlet embedded in the floor of my living room, exactly where we put the tables
when we have people over. It even has its own cheese icon on the official
electrical diagram.
When we were building the house, I thought about what happens when we have
people over. We move the tables into the living room, we get out a few raclette
machines, and then we do what everyone does: run extension cords across the room
and connect an unreasonable amount of heating equipment to whatever outlet
happens to be nearby.
That seemed stupid. The floor was open, the electrical panel was being
installed, and adding another circuit cost almost nothing. Fixing it afterwards
would mean breaking tiles.
So I asked the electrician to put a 20A outlet in the floor, right where the
raclette tables go. At 230 V that is about 4.6 kW, or three to four raclette
machines running flat out. He had apparently never been asked that before, and
he found it hilarious enough that “Prise Raclette” ended up on the official
electrical diagram.
People laugh when they first see it. Then we have a raclette, and there are no
extension cords, no power strips, no cables crossing the room. You bring out the
tables, open the floor outlet, plug in the machines and melt cheese.
My neighbour liked it enough that he eventually installed one too. Except his
house was already finished.
I work with infrastructure for a living, and in the cloud, keeping options open
is easy. Need more compute? Change a number. Need another network? Add one. Need
more storage? API call.
Buildings are unfortunately not software-defined. If you discover five years
later that you should have installed another conduit across your garden, the
migration procedure involves a shovel. This changes the economics considerably.
When we built the house, and later when I started building a small detached
office in the garden, I ended up applying a fairly simple rule:
If something is cheap to provision now and expensive to retrofit later,
provision it now.