Renovate bot advanced tricks feature

Renovate Bot: 4 advanced tips and tricks – Part II

This is part two of a series that provides tips for advanced Renovate Bot users. It gives valueable tips for writing your own regex managers, explains why and how to self-host a Renovate Bot instance, how you can reduce friction when introducting Renovate to your teams, and encourages interacting with the active Renovate community. Introduction … Read more

Renovate bot advanced tricks feature

Renovate Bot: 3 advanced tips and tricks – Part I

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

back up Docker volumes feature image

Backup Docker volumes (and restore them) – done right

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

Terraform broken drift detection feature

Broken drift detection with Terraform

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 cheat sheet feature

Renovate bot cheat sheet – the 11 most useful customizations

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 introduction feature

Automatic dependency updates – a Renovate Bot introduction

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

Boost your shell productivity with AI feature

Research and boost your shell productivity with AI

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

Shell productivity tricks feature

Shell productivity tricks – the best shortcuts to boost your shell usage

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

compliance checks feature

Compliance checks in your IDE, Git hooks or CI

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

release it book summary feature

Book recommendation: Release It! – Design and Deploy Production-Ready Software

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