Posts

A while back I built tech-playground.com, which I describe like this: A playground that runs your config on real servers for you, a bit like CodePen for server tech. At the time of writing this includes nginx, HAProxy, Jinja, Django Template Engine and Go Template. Having released the project to the public back in June of 2023, through my social media channels and some private groups, it got moderate usage - about 2-3 requests per day that were not me using it in my daily work. [Read More]

Debugging container workloads can be a challenge sometimes, especially when running them in k8s, behind a reverse proxy or in other, possibly complex, traffic flow scenarios.

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Copy & paste from untrusted sources on the internet into the terminal is a really bad idea! Early in my career I did it too and still often see others doing it.

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I write an extensive personal knowledge base using markdown, code-server and a variety of other tools. Originally, in 2021, I wanted to have something like Obsidian Publish but self-hosted, so I created it.

Over time my knowledge base evolved more into a second brain, tracking not only my technical notes and journal, but also things like recipes and hikes. With this my publishing pipeline, and the script at it’s core, extended in a multitude of ways.

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In this post I share my process for building the MVP for PodHistory, from idea to launched product and what my next steps will be.

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This is a guide to a simple self organization/task management system I built for myself over the years.

From time to time I showed it to someone and they got some benefits from it, most adapted it to better fit their needs down the line, which is exactly what you should do with any kind of personal task management in my opinion.

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Sometimes you have to do a specific task and you are fully capable of doing it manually, however those tasks are also great to flex your muscles and hack something together.

They can be an excellent tool to sharpen your skills with the tools you use regularly, and improve your quick prototyping skills.

In addition, with a couple of iterations, again sharpening an important skill, you could afterwards create a more general purpose tool from a hacky script.

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Given the recent rise in text-based language models, sometimes called AI tools, I wanted to share my thoughts and experiences in using them, especially in the context of blogging.

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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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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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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]

The other day I was playing around in WSL with a colleague of mine and we did this:

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The problem: Docker itself can’t be run in WSL2 as it requires the docker daemon, usually run though systemd.

The solution: Podman works just fine and can easily be installed, although we will need to configure some things to make it work properly.

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Starting on the first of March 2022 I no longer work full-time in my day job. That sentence has been about a year in the making and makes me both happy and a bit scared about the future. I have been doing some side-hustle and projects since I’ve been 16 building websites with my dad, so you could say it has been a long time coming. Right now I have set myself three mid-term goals to build up something that brings me joy and financial independence. [Read More]

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The Problem You want to push a branch to GitLab and automatically create a Merge Request (MR) for it. There are effectively three scenarios this can cover: Create a MR in draft state with a custom title Create a MR Create a MR and automatically merge if CI/CD pipeline succeeds Manually this is quite the process: Push branch to origin Copy link to create a MR Open the link, change fields to represent wanted state and submit The Solution GitLab offers push options1 that allow us to instruct it to do more than just plain git push. [Read More]