This is part one of a two-part series that provides tips for advanced Renovate Bot users. Part 1 explains some important, basic concepts, illustrates how Renovate approaches creating and updating PRs as a flow chart, and goes into details about Renovate’s “post upgrade tasks” feature. Introduction to Renovate Bot Renovate (Bot) is a CLI tool … 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
Renovate bot is a tool that automatically updates third-party dependencies declared in your Git repository via pull requests. This Renovate bot cheat sheet helps teams who adopt Renovate with customizing the most common (and useful) configuration options, without having to read the entire, extensive Renovate bot documentation. Originally posted on 2021-07-25, updated on 2023-07-30. Introduction … Read more
Renovate bot is a tool that automatically updates software dependencies declared in your Git repository via pull requests. In this Renovate bot introduction I explain the benefits of automated dependency updates, how the Renovate bot works, how to operate/run the bot yourself (if necessary), and how you can configure the bot’s behavior for each repository. … 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
In this book recommendation, I review the second edition of the book Release It! Design and Deploy Production-Ready Software by Michael Nygard, released in 2018. I also offer my 27 page summary of the book as free download. Introduction A common misconception is that the majority of the costs in a software-based project is allocated to … Read more
In this article I present 6 kinds of real-world Docker portability issues, where Docker-based software does not run or build the same way on two different machines. Introduction to Docker portability When I started learning about Docker several years ago, I was very enthusiastic about its promise of portability: write your software and Dockerfile once, … Read more