Latest blog posts

Managing secrets in Git repositories has been one of the biggest issues when I write code. I have used multiple solutions based on the complexity and how many things I have to do in case of leaks. I was looking for a solution that would work and be good enough for my simple Ansible Playbooks, and I stumbled upon the Mozilla SOPS: something that makes handling secrets not complicated when working alone on simple projects.

I have been writing down events of my life for the last 10 years. I want to celebrate this achievement. 🎉☺️ This diary helped me a lot in the past, and I wish to convince anyone who is on the fence about starting one to go for it. Those are my personal observation. I started writing a diary because I wanted to avoid cognitive biases and have a more objective memory for my future self.

Often I find myself using third-party software like Caffeine or Amphetamine to keep my Mac awake while running some specific commands. Sometimes it is because I am running backups. Sometimes it is because I am compiling something. I found out that macOS comes pre-installed with caffeinete command… this post is about how to integrate it in your Makefile so that running any command there will prevent your Mac from sleeping!

A few months ago, I received my Steam Deck, the super powerful portable Linux gaming device made by Valve, the company behind Steam, and capable of playing Windows games without Windows. Taken by my irresistible desire to tinker with it, I noticed that it uses a read-only root and OverlayFS to guarantee the best experience for all the users. This is so Smart! So I have decided to do something similar on my Raspberry Pi running my NAS to test upgrades before actually upgrading.

A few months ago, I became the Lead Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) in Visma e-conomic. This new position is allowing me to work with brilliant people! In our industry, brilliant colleagues often have a hard time collaborating, and communication is very hard. In this post, I want to talk about the start of our journey from an Operational (Ops) team to embracing SRE using kindness and compassion as a way: Trust and forgiveness.

This blog post is about what I have changed in my blog and website to make it faster. Recently, I have traveled with a bad airplane company that delayed my luggage. In the hope of getting my belongings back with me, I tried to use their website and support pages, and I was frustrated every time. The primary source of frustration was the website speed. So I decided to spend most of the time without my luggage (around five days), trying to use best practices to improve my website and blog, making my Hugo blog faster and way lighter than before.

During the dark side of quarantine, I had to keep my hands busy, and instead of writing on this blog (sorry!) I started streaming on Twitch instead. To add some interactivity with my viewers, I made my own bot to let my viewers create and display custom Images and GIFs with text… Basically, a Meme Generator! This is the story of designing it, building it in Go, and running it Heroku 🤩

If you are using Orion, Siderus’ IPFS desktop client, you might have noticed that the app has not received any update during the last year.

Around a year ago, after noticing an extensive amount of misusage of our IPFS Gateway to share illegal content, I have decided to redirect the traffic to the official IPFS Gateway. We took down the servers and IPFS nodes and gateways from every continent.

I recently decided to replace my k8s home cluster with a Hashicorp Nomad cluster on my 3 Raspberry Pis. When I was using it, I found myself writing a significant amount of HCL files, and I have been missing Helm’s simplicity.

As an SRE, I have been working with Kubernetes for a while now. During this time, I had to install, configure, and distribute some apps using Helm. For me, it is a de-facto standard when it comes to deploy and maintain apps that otherwise would require a way bigger list of YAML files. Can we do the same for Nomad Jobs’s definitions?

I have the feeling that a blog post about distributing packages is needed. 😮 In a word filled with Containers, PaaS, and SaaS, it seems weird to talk about how we can automate the creation of Debian packages and APT repositories. Nonetheless, even if this appears to be a forgotten step for operations, some projects are not distributed over Debian packages, 👷‍♂️ and I need them for my Raspberry Pi! 😜