Productivity

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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Tools I use and recommend. carrd.co Extremely simple and affordable website publishing, I use it for landing pages and quick MVPs DigitalOcean My first choice for personal servers and simple MVP deployments with their App Platform GitLab.com My go-to git-server and allrounder CI/CD, both on premise in the enterprise and in the cloud for my own projects PythonAnywhere They provide a great service, best described as a PHP-webspace, but for Python [Read More]

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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The idea at the start was simple. Do something like Obsidian Publish , so read frontmatter and if it contains published: True put it up on a website to view. The Basics I started with taking a look at different static site generators but after a bit of testing I ended up back at Hugo, which I already use for ps1.guru and a few other projects. First I placed a Hugo project loosely based on the GitLab Pages template in . [Read More]

You can intercept normal name resolution in curl with the --resolve parameter allowing you to do things like talk to a specific site of a DNS load-balanced setup or talk to a new deployment not yet made productive. You can specify the resolve option multiple times so you can even catch redirects and move them to where you want as well. It’s important to note that this intercept does only work on the ports you specify in the entries. [Read More]

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]

Backstory I recently wrote a post about PowerShell Aliasing for the folks over at ScriptRunner. The one issue I had while researching for this post was this: You can not create a alias for a function and overwrite one of it’s parameters at the same time while keeping nice features like tab-complete. For a concrete example of this visit please look at the original post. At the end of the post I asked if anyone had a solution to this problem - and the internet delivered! [Read More]