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 🤩
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! 😜
All static websites meet a hard limit when a comment form, “like” buttons, or any interactive content is required. These extra components force people to build an API, host a server, a database or pay for any SaaS product that does that… we could write a blog post about that, but it would be too easy! 🤣 Instead in this article, I wanted to challenge myself a little more and explore how to make a decentralized like button: We will try how it is to not be hosting any server or database, and instead use a p2p networks and a decentralized database to count the likes. 👍
During the last year, I have been curious about Immutable Infrastructure. After researching, I noticed that I had been applying some of these concepts already to stateless Docker containers, and I wanted to do a practical project with it. So I thought about exploring Immutable Infrastructure and use it to deploy Hashicorp Vault.
The journey that I have decided to take with Siderus brought myself always in embarrassing moment on meetings Hyped discussion about “Blockchain” and data storage. In this article I don’t want to talk about the misconceptions about storing data into a blockchain, but instead I want to focus on a more generic question that I have been asked: Is a blockchain useful for human being? Can we use it for good?
During the last year I have learned how important it is to build, test and deploy using always the same docker container as well as reducing its size. As I have not found anything online, I want to remember and share it: I am testing my go packages with a multistage docker build inside my pipeline on GitLab. The odd way of testing go docker containers Especially when implementing CI best practices, I have seen projects running tests in different ways:
One of the biggest things that I have been learning is the discipline of being focused on the main goal. I get distracted every few minutes, and if it is not an advertisement, or a funny cloud in the sky, it is an event that we may consider bigger than it actually is. Instead, I don’t want to lose the focus on the prize. I want to write something personal. I remember when I was in high school.
A month ago I have ordered, as a backup device, a Chromebook. I was watching videos on youtube and I have selected the ASUS Chromebook Flip without thinking much. It is powerful, cute, convertible, the screen is not that bad and the keyboard is meh… you can get used to its size. The main problem was not the hardware: after a month with Google ChromeOS, as a developer, I am really disappointed.
I remember when I was 10 and my mother was worried about me staying too much in front of the computer, writing lines of weird text on a black and white screen; I used to be one of these boys that were not supported by friends and family, because it was hard to understand computers… 🤔 but now things have changed, and writing code is cool. I consider myself a 75% self-taught developer, meaning that I have been learning how to write code by myself, a little in school and by working.