James Read's Code, Containers & Cloud blog

Google Photos, the free, easy to use, on-for-many-android-users service has been the single Photo backup strategy for many of those who have used it, since it was released in 2015. I, for one, was amazed to discover that I have uploaded photos dating as far back as 2005, totalling over 80Gb. Initially, Google photos seemed like that ultimate, hassle-free, cloud backup service that would never be replaced…. However, as time went on, I found myself growing increasingly concern about cloud services that “own” my personal data. and I’ve just now managed to clear my data out of Google Photos.

I love Ansible, and I love doing certifications - so this was a no-brainer. In this blog I’ll talk about how I prepared, how the exam felt, was it worth it, and at the end I’ll even explain why I used a cow image as the cover for this blog post! ¹

It’s been interesting to witness the meteoric rise of “Docker” over the years, and it is undoubted that the technology that was pioneered and popularized by Docker (more correctly called “Linux Containers”), is here to stay for the long run. The rise of the technology was partially due to the ease of publishing containers, enabled by free DockerHub service. However, in this article, I propose that DockerHub as a single repository of container images is becoming less and less important than it once was, and in it’s place, GitHub is a strong contender to take over as the 1 repository for containers — as it has its sights on being everything a developer needs.

Chat that is always compatible, updated, and integrates with browser extensions.

Too many chat apps — can’t change that.

The amount of chat applications and protocols out there now-a-days is getting absolutely crazy. It’s like in the 1990s, when we had ICQ, AIM, IRC, and others. For a little while, I felt like things were getting better — I got down to just 2 chat apps!…

Fast-forward to today — the chat apps I need are unfortunately even more than in the 90s. However, something that has changed for the good: thankfully all of them have web-based versions. Here are all the webchat options I have loaded in Firefox now;

The TURTLES model.

How many times have you seen projects abandoned on GitHub, or internal Wikis, with no explanation, no “next steps”, no follow-up or notes? How many hundreds of hours were lost to that project, and what was learned?

This article proposes a model (“TURTLES”), or more simply, a checklist, of how to properly archive a project.

Is now the right time to archive this project?

• T — Technologists: Do enough people contribute to maintaining this project? Developers, Architects, Security, Operations?

This helps you use Go to power the next generation of APIs+PWAs.

Prerequisites; This article assumes you know what protobuf and gRPC are, and have set up the grpc-gateway for REST already for your app.

The context

gRPC has become the default standard for modern Cloud Native RPC in Go. And gRPC is fine for backend service-to-service communication that can speak gRPC. To support older services, and the web, REST still reigns supreme.

Reading the source code is a pathway to many abilities that some consider… unnatural.

Luke’s original strategy was to attack the death star via SQL injection, but in the end he went for an X-Wing based buffer overflow.

I want to encourage you to actually read through the open source code for the software that you’re using. Doing so has many potential benefits, and skills like this can give you a real edge and advantage in your team. In the article I’m going to outline my top three benefits for doing so.

There are a lot of cool Linux commands and tools you COULD learn, but what’s the point in investing a bunch of time if you just use them once a week, or once a month? A good example I like to give is Vim — it takes a long time to learn and master, but I use it over 10 times a day so it’s worth it.

vim — the universal text editor

I remember thinking vim was stupid — so many keypresses and shortcuts to remember. Before that I was a nano user. What got me to switch? I started getting really annoyed that all the servers I was logging into didn’t have nano installed, didn’t have syntax highlighting, and similar. I consciously stuck with it and now I have a text editor that I love on every server.

Taken in approx Mar 2021

I want to explain how I use this setup, and how I got here. Perhaps I will encourage you, to experiment with your desk and workflow.

Pictured above, is my desk. It does indeed have 6 monitors. It also has 4 computers with 3 operating systems (2x Linux, 1x Windows — for gaming, 1x Mac — for iOS development).

I don’t intend to brag, or show off, or try and say that this set-up is absolutely essential for me and that nothing else would work. However, it certainly works for me. This is what I naturally got to after lots of experimenting over the years. I certainly don’t think having lots of monitors is right for many people — certainly 1 large 4k ultra wide monitor is a very popular option for many people now-a-days.

My desktop after the story; i3, st, and some other stuff.

It was worth it, but I need to explain how I got here.

It’s about 2pm on a Friday afternoon, my week of meetings is finally drying up. I have a few hours in my calendar the rest of the day — and I’m not going to spend it catching up on more emails. I want to fill these last couple of hours with something a bit more fun, so I pick up the Ansible collection I was hacking code on and get to work.