Marco's Blog

Now that we have talked about the benefits of running your own server and how to run your own server let’s take a look at some things you could run on your own personal server and some things you should better not. Host a code-server code-server is an open-source application that allows you to run VSCode on your server and access it from any browser. It’s perfect for taking notes or journaling from anywhere, as you can access it from any device with a browser. [Read More]

There are many ways to run your own server, from setting up a Raspberry Pi on your desk to renting a physical server at a provider.

In this post, we will focus on setting up a virtual server with DigitalOcean, which is one of the easiest ways to get started.

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In the world of technology, we are moving further and further away from operating directly on servers, but there are still significant benefits to be gained from running a personal server.

I have been running some kind of personal server for many years now and I strongly believe anyone working in technology can benefit greatly from doing so. Here’s why:

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In this post I will go over the MVP building phase of Honeypot Login, from idea to launched product and what my next steps will be.

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Setting up a new repository for YAML linting today I was running in a bit of an issue with yamllint. I was using a YAML list to specify ingores, as mentioned in the documentation: ignore: - "*.dont-lint-me.yaml" - "/bin/" - "!/bin/*.lint-me-anyway.yaml" This however did not work with the above mentioned error message. After a lot of debugging I found that they released a new version recently which introduced this feature. [Read More]

The problem

If you use ssh-agent with an encrypted ssh key it does not persist when you open a new terminal window.

The solution

Use keychain instead.

1. Install

   sudo apt install keychain
   

2. Add to your shells rc file, eg. .bashrc or .zshrc

   # Repeat this line for all keys you want to unlock and use this way
   /usr/bin/keychain -q --nogui $HOME/.ssh/id_rsa
   source $HOME/.keychain/wsl-sh
   

3. Unlock your keys on shell startup and enjoy

Running any kind of personal infrastructure sometimes requires your attention based on certain events or failure states, no matter how much you automate tasks.

Over the years I have used E-Mail, Telegram bots and a variety of other tools for this purpose. However all of them have the drawback that they mix with other kinds of information and are not easilly usable in scripts.

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Sometimes you may want to commit only the files you have changed and not any newly created files, this can easily be achieved by this command: git commit -a

From the git mapage:

OPTIONS
    -a, --all
        Tell the command to automatically stage files that have been modified and deleted, but new files you have not told Git about are not affected.

Incidents happen, and we can and should always learn from them, to be better prepared for the next time things go wrong. A great tool to do that is the post-mortem, it is a process designed to recap the incident, learn from mistakes and improve the system as a result. Basic principles There are some basic principles that can help achieve a good post-mortem process. They are only guidelines and I recommend adapting them to what works best in your organization. [Read More]

Ever since diving into the software development world I was troubled by a duality: On the one hand I have built and operated many services described as monolithic with relative ease, on the other hand I’m always told I, and others, should build microservices because they are better in a variety of ways. With this post I’m going to compare both software architectures by looking at the key benefits often associated with microservices and additional considerations I think are important. [Read More]