It’s been a while since my last weeknote. This is a good sign that not only I have better control of my tasks again, but also that there’s been events and insights worth writing about in the first place.

→ Read more...

Following up on my recent post on ngrok, I found an interesting alternative via @shakalandy’s newsletter. Bore presents itself as “a modern, simple TCP tunnel that exposes local ports to a remote server, bypassing standard NAT connection firewalls.”

→ Read more...

This month, a new intern from Spain started at my company. While we used to use Macbooks for our interns, he was the first to get a Linux laptop. Nothing fits the DevOps use case better, after all.

→ Read more...

I just finished the first round of my weekly Linux Shell Workshop which I’m teaching live on my Twitch channel. It’s been a lot of fun, and getting direct feedback from people who are new to the topic and find value in it felt great.

→ Read more...

I don’t think I ever copied more vim or zsh configuration from anyone than from ChrisAtMachine. Looks like I found a soulmate. 😊 His YouTube channel is well worth watching!

→ Read more...

Not counting IoT devices and the Raspberry Pi in my PiDP-11, I haven’t had a Linux machine at home for more than 10 years. End of last year, I decided to get a dedicated Linux box under my desk again so I can enjoy the full Linux experience when I do software and infrastructure engineering.

→ Read more...

Well-structured status lines in vim and shell prompts with version control symbols are a nice quality-of-life improvement. Unfortunately, not all monospace fonts come with the necessary PowerLine glyphs. For example, my favourite font is Operator Mono, and it too doesn’t have PowerLine symbols built in.

→ Read more...

A big chunk of my work time in recent weeks has been going into getting Netdata set up to monitor our server fleet. Where we already have it in place, it’s an amazing help in investigating resources issues and bottlenecks. I’m looking forward to getting alerts about issues that might occur soon. Well, I don’t look forward to getting alerts, but I’d rather be alerted about risks when they’re building up than when they already hit. And that’s what Netdata is going to make possible by extrapolating historic data.

→ Read more...

I’ve just returned from our summer vacation. I spent two weeks visiting friends and family in Germany; my wife and kids are staying for one week more. On one hand, it’s always nice to see people again. On the other hand, I spent even more time in between get-togethers alone in our guest room than I usually do to recharge my introvert batteries because of the ongoing pandemic and the dubious behaviour of so many people. I’m longing for a future in which I don’t have to fear for my health anymore while travelling.

→ Read more...

The latest RubyTapas tutorial taught me the difference between the dotenv and direnv tools. While they have significant overlap, they complement each other quite nicely. dotenv simplifies both development and production ops by importing environments variables either from a .env file or the application hosting platform. direnv on the other hand augments the dev environment even further; not only can it add dev-only variables but also modify shell settings like extending $PATH on a per-project basis.

→ Read more...