Latest blog posts about Today I Learned

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.

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!

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.

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. I have been working with several developers that taught me a lot. Some good developers suggested me new and exciting things. Others bad developers taught me how to be a better developer. I have recognized a pattern in almost all of them: they are not continously learning new things, and they don’t care much.

Since when I was little, I always loved peer-to-peer technologies… I even tried to create a GNU/Linux distribution based on that. .. but recently I have discovered a brilliant project that is combining the power of asynchronous cryptography, using Bitcoin private and public keys, with BitTorrent technology. This project is called ZeroNet and it is a new and interesting way to provide websites and real-time services in a p2p network.

Since I started working at bigger startups, like MinbilDinbil, I had to face the problem of providing pages to a larger amount of users every day. For this reason, it is really important to use a CDN service like CloudFlare, in order to provide a good user experience on our website: we don’t want our clients wait too much to load the homepage! How do we do that?