I recently switched from Visual Studio Code (VS Code) to Helix as my primary text editor. I wanted a more efficient and powerful modal editor for working with Go, Terraform, YAML, and other languages and tools. I also appreciated the lightweight and efficient design of Helix. In this post, I will discuss my experience with the switch and the adjustments I made to make Helix a better fit for my daily work.
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.
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?
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:
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.
JavaScript development is crazy, and evolving fast… and the more you learn about it the more you realize how crazy it has become 😅. I think it is exciting, indeed, but Sean, in his clear post explained perfectly why a simple project is over-engineered and I have to disagree with him: some JavaScript’s frameworks, like React, are not the cause of unnecessarily complicated projects… and React is not over engineered!
During the last month I started experimenting a lot with some editors for software development. I’ve been playing for 2 weeks with Atom and Visual Studio Code and here are my impressions from a Mac and Sublime user.