The year 2023 has come to an end, so I took some time to reflect on my activities. Website / Blogging – who is reading this anyway? In 2020, I relaunched my personal website, using WordPress with the GeneratePress theme, which has been a good choice so far. In general, WordPress is quite good, except … Read more
This article explores my Kubernetes operator that provisions Azure Pipelines agents as Kubernetes Pods. It comes with an in-depth tutorial for how to use my operator. I also explore all alternative options for running Azure Pipeline agents, and explain why using a Kubernetes-based option beats all other options. Introduction CI/CD pipelines are a cornerstone to … Read more
This article explains BuildKit caching in detail. First you learn background knowledge, e.g. how the local and remote cache differs, and what kinds of cache items BuildKit can store where. Then, BuildKit’s garbage collection is explained in detail. Finally, I present 5 tricks to speed up your image builds, e.g. tuning the garbage collection policies, … Read more
This article explains how Docker builds images with BuildKit, via buildx. It discusses the advantages of BuildKit over Docker’s legacy image builder, and then elaborates on three approaches for calling BuildKit in Docker: 1) using the embedded BuildKit library managed by the Docker daemon, 2) using a BuildKit container managed by buildx, and 3) using … Read more
In this post I demonstrate how I increased my productivity with the help of focus tools. They automatically reserve focus time periods in my calendar and automatically trigger my operating system’s focus mode on and off, based on the calendar events. Introduction In my daily work life, it is difficult to allocate time slots where … Read more
This article explains how to use “tar” correctly, to backup Docker volumes and restore them. I explain why two top-ranked tutorials are not doing a good job, by taking them apart. Finally, I give hints for creating backups of Docker volumes in production. Introduction Making a local backup of a Docker volume and restoring it … Read more
When the resources of a Terraform provider (e.g. Azure) define “computed” optional attributes, these are not properly covered by Terraform’s drift detection. As I will demonstrate, this can lead to non-reproducible infrastructure. I also experiment with Terraform’s behavior, depending on what you declare in your configuration file, the content of your state file, and the … Read more
I explain how using Large Language Models (a form of AI) can boost your shell productivity. The basic idea is to have LLMs generate shell commands or scripts, rather than researching them with traditional approaches (such as a search engine). I discuss the advantages and disadvantages of LLMs over classic research approaches. I conclude by … Read more
In this article I present over 20 useful keyboard shortcuts and commands that boost your shell productivity (Terminal). Links to the source materials are provided, with tips for reducing mental load caused when trying to adopt too many shortcuts at once. Introduction In my Digital tool efficiency article, I discussed why many people use their … Read more
In this article I compare several approaches for running compliance checks, like validating Git commit messages with a regular expression, or linting your code. I explain how these checks can either run in your IDE, in a local pre-commit hook, a remote pre-receive Git hook, or as part of your CI pipeline. I compare these … Read more