computers.wtf

The Tao of SDLC Now that Scrum, Agile, Kanban and other methodologies have become the Tao of DevOps and SDLC (Software Development Life Cycle), not a day goes by without the ubiquitous and oftentimes annoying user stories typically found in issue tracking systems such as Jira and Trello. “As an end user, I want to be able to see the website the same way in all browsers”; “As a customer of Irrelevant Inc. [Read More]

A big messy smartphone That’s what I see whenever I open a laptop in the hope of repairing it or pimping it up. My efforts inevitably result in resentful failures, and I either leave the thing broken or send it to a technician. Me, fixing a clumsy block of metal and plastic where every single piece is soldered up or goes inside of a chip? No, thanks. Before you think I give up too fast, let me tell you that, sure, I could learn how to fix my own laptops, but that’s not the point; the point is I don’t want to. [Read More]

Easy and cheap (and privacy aware?) Your team is building a static website for another super frugal client, Nofrills Coffee. You’ve already figured out how to host it in the easiest and cheapest way possible, but the client also needs to be able to receive feedback from users through a web form. You wish the front end developers could just submit the form to one of those “free” services like Formspree and Simple Form, but you’re too wary of security and privacy to hand things over like that. [Read More]

Smells like a hack One of the first things we learn at the Ansible Best Practices University is that roles are a godsend, playbooks are great and ad hoc commands are meh. And that’s absolutely true… Except when it isn’t. I take configuration as code as an achievement comparable to subsidized anti-Polio injections—once we accomplish such a feat as a society, we don’t let it be taken from us too easily. [Read More]

“How much?!?” 34 billion (with a b!) USD, approximately. After the announcement came this Sunday (28 October 2018) that IBM was buying Red Hat, the specialized media went crazy and flooded the Internet with all sorts of articles about the acquisition. Most of them hit the nail on the head (that IBM wants to play the cloud game), but without going too deep into what Ginni Rometty specifically meant when she said that “IBM will become the world’s #1 hybrid cloud provider. [Read More]

Don’t litter my path I’m not a germophobe, but I can’t stand a dirty $PATH. I like mine neat and clean, so that my tab completions are fast, sweet and within the realms of sanity. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, go to the previous installment of this series and read the full thing. ImageMagick is an image manipulation tool that can “create, edit, compose, or convert bitmap images” and is typically used from the command line. [Read More]

Reality shock As soon as I started working in IT, I avoided getting too attached to any specific framework or language. Every company has their preferred framework(s) and language(s), and when you’re working on a specific project, you need to commit to a set of tools and concepts. That doesn’t instantaneously pigeonhole you into them, though. I saw myself as doing software engineering; period. I had, and still have, no interest in being more specific than that. [Read More]

Background Someone asked me over the weekend how to trigger a build in Jenkins through a Git webhook and send parameters to the build at the same time. I don’t know why anyone would pass parameters like that (from SCM as opposed to a script), but since I’ve already spent the time figuring out how to do it, here it is. In this article, I’ll go over the steps taken by the person who asked for help and then talk about where their assumptions went wrong and how to actually achieve what they wanted. [Read More]

Overview “I want the devices in my house to communicate with each other, but remembering their IP addresses is almost as bad as going through a gum surgery.” Yeah, man, I hear you. You’d love to refer to that 192.168.0.101 as tv.home, 192.168.0.107 as games.home, and of course 192.168.0.119 as sherlock.home, wouldn’t you? And, while it’d be awesome if you could achieve that directly through your ISP’s router, when you open its web GUI, there’s no option for that… WTF? [Read More]

EBS volumes If you’ve been on the clouds lately, especially AWS, you certainly know that attaching EBS (Elastic Block Store) volumes to EC2 instances is part of almost any AWS set up. In fact, EBS volumes are so foundational that some AWS services, such as RDS (Relational Database Service), rely on them for storage.1 Creating and attaching those volumes is just half of the story, though; to guarantee a peaceful, undisturbed night of sleep, you should also back them up periodically. [Read More]