“OH GAWD” Around the time of the subprime mortgage collapse, I was working in an enterprise software company. I worked in a large open space full of cubic...
Tutorials
CI/CD (continuous integration / continuous delivery) helps development teams optimize software quality tests before delivering committed changes into produc...
How do you rapidly deliver new features without delivering bugs at the same rate? By running automatic builds and tests on all of your code before it gets i...
On November 20, 2020 Docker began rate limiting requests to its popular Docker Hub registry. This change applied to all users, anonymous or free. When this ...
It turns out Awk is pretty simple. It has only a couple of conventions and only a small amount of syntax. It’s straightforward to learn, and once you underst...
When I started writing applications in 2010, things were simple. I would write the code, perform merges, run tests (if any), build, and upload to the App St...
Building software is a multi-step process—installing or updating dependencies, compiling the source code, testing, installing, and so on. In any moderately ...
make is a commonplace utility in the development world. It automates the process of generating executables, documentations, and other non-source files from ...
Background: Fingers, Head, and Google Whenever I reach a stopping point in my work, I use a bash alias called gwip1 to create a ‘work in progress’ commi...
Where Did All The Rain Go? It’s been a really dry summer here in Victoria BC (and the rest of the province). I couldn’t remember the last time it had ra...
How do you convert JSON values to CSV and back at the command line? I’ve done this task on many occasions and been stung by the edge cases frequently enough...
Microsoft announced recently a new Visual Studio Code extension to handle Makefiles. This extension provides a set of commands to the editor that will facil...
Automation testing is a crucial element to speed up your delivery process. It aims to flush out any potential regressions. The more you automate, the more c...
Lately, I’ve been doing a lot more things at the command line. I’m not a hard-core terminal guy – I use VSCode more than Vim – but I’m always surprised at t...
matplotlib is an excellent library for creating graphs and visualizations in Python. For example, I used it to generate the performance graphs in my merging...
Building and testing any large codebase is time-consuming, error-prone, and repetitive. Golang supports multi-platform builds, which is excellent, but it n...
Here is a problem. You are tasked with improving the hot loop of a Python program: maybe it is an in-memory sequential index of some sort. The slow part is...
Even though Python is regarded as an interpreted language and the files need not be compiled separately, many developers are unaware that you can still use ...
Concatenate Two Lists in Python Problem: You have two lists and you’d like to join them into a new list. Solution: Python 3.8.2 >>> one = [&q...
C++ is one of the most dominant programming languages. Although there are many compilers available, GCC still ranks as one of the most popular choices for ...
Many linting, code formatting, and static analysis tools exist for code. You can use eslint, gofmt, or many other static analysis tools, combined with a gre...
This tutorial is a follow up to creating and hosting your own deb and apt repo, but is written for creating rpm packages for redhat-based Linux distributio...
Some modern development practices are easiest to understand from a historical perspective: things started a certain way, and then steps were added or remove...
As an Ubuntu user, I find myself typing apt install … frequently as a way to install software on my system. But what if I wanted to distribute my code t...
In software engineering, continuous integration is the practice of merging all developers’ working copies to a shared mainline several times a day. Grady ...
Protocol Buffers serialize structured data so it can be efficiently stored or shared over a network. They were designed for internal use at Google in 2001 a...
At first glance, writing Dockerfiles appears to be a straightforward process. After all, most basic examples reflect the same set of steps. However, not all...
Distributing shareware from the 90’s in modern Docker images.
A monorepo is perhaps what you would expect from the name: a single code repository for your entire codebase. Wikipedia describes it as a decade-old softw...
Docker is the de facto model for building and running containers at scale in most enterprise organizations today. At a very high level, Docker is a combinat...
The Elixir language, along with the Phoenix framework, has been growing in popularity at a quick pace, and with good reason. Phoenix offers productivity lev...
There’s nothing more frustrating than a sluggish continuous integration system. It slows down feedback loops and prevents code from reaching production quic...
Bash scripts give you the ability to turn a tedious series of commands into an easily runnable and repeatable script. With many real-world use cases, like u...
How are containers made? Usually, from a series of statements like RUN, FROM, and COPY, which are put into a Dockerfile and built. But how are those commands...
Ngrok is a tool that allows you to create secure, publically accessible URLs for your locally running code.
Docker logging and its management are an important part of the containerization of your application. Once you’ve deployed your application, logging is one o...
A container is a simple unit that packages all your code and its dependencies so your application can run quickly and reliably from any computing environmen...
There is an excellent open-source project that you have probably used without realizing it. It’s called BuildKit, and it is what turns a Dockerfile into a D...
Have you ever wanted to see what kinds of requests a service or application on your machine is making and what kind of responses it is getting back?
We’re currently working on a server for sharing secrets between developers and CI systems, and one of the features we decided to support is passwordless log...
I was surprised to learn that Google protocol buffers (protobufs), were first introduced nearly two decades ago. They were used internally at google as earl...
Have you ever had a test fail in the build but not locally? I have. Have you ever then burnt half a day pushing small changes and waiting for your build to ...
Articles
As creators of a new approach to build automation, we have always strived to create products that we ourselves would have wished we had. While this may sound...
Observability If you do software-as-a-service development and you have paying customers, you at some point learn about the need for operational monitoring...
Some years ago, when I worked in a physical office, I was having trouble with a new report I was developing. The reasonably complex SQL that generated the ...
Applying city planning to software development
Here is a somewhat fictionalized personal story. I’ve changed the names of the people and the technology used. Raising Objections I was a new engineerin...
I wanted to sit down and write about all the tricks we learned and that we used every day to help make builds more manageable in the absence of Earthly.
Continuous integration has become prevalent in software development, but it’s still a complex and wide-ranging topic. In this post, we’ll cover the basics o...
I’ve noticed something interesting about the types of programming languages people like. It’s something that doesn’t seem to come up in various discussions o...
My article about how YAML makes a bad programming language 1 generated a lot of great discussions online. Here are some highlights, lightly edited: Conf...
So I’ve been using my new M1-based MacBook Pro for a couple of months for a mix of development, email, and other things an open-source maintainer does day-t...
In 1972, two students learning FORTRAN came up with a fantastic new programming language called INTERCAL.
The decision of whether to use a monorepo or a polyrepo structure for your source code can be a very emotional (maybe even religious!) battle. On its surfac...
The public release of Scala was 17 years ago today. The language and its community are certainly not standing still, so I’ve put together a list of my favo...
Why Learn Go If I were a system administrator looking to learn a new programming language it would be Go.So many of our tools including Kubernetes, Prom...
Starting in early December, a mad dash has been underway to migrate open-source projects off of Travis CI. What happened and where should you move your proj...
In 1998, Kent Beck wrote sUnit, a unit testing framework for SmallTalk. Beck later ported this framework to Java as jUnit. From there, xUnit frameworks spre...
Tell me if this sounds familiar? You were introduced to docker-compose either by choice or by force. You’ve been using it for a while, but you find it clun...
Here at Earthly, we are building an internal platform on AWS using EKS. I talked to our lead architect Corey Larson about the decisions and trade offs he is...
Here at Earthly, we are building an internal platform on AWS using EKS. I talked to our lead architect Corey Larson about the decisions and trade offs he is...
News
We’re excited to announce that Earthly is participating in Hacktoberfest this October again. Last year we saw lots of great contributions from the communi...
“When I learned about Earthly, I was excited to see innovative work happening in containerized build and testing automation.”
Earthly users and prospective users - today we are announcing our switch to Business Source License 1.1 (BSL). We would like to provide Earthly to as many...
We’ve been working with many of you to better understand your pains and use-cases when it comes to builds.
Since Hacktoberfest started two weeks ago, we’ve seen a spike in traffic to Earthly. We saw developers of all levels coming together to improve our project ...
Hello, developers of planet Earth! Earlier this year, we at Earthly embarked on a journey to bring better builds to the world. We started with a deep belief...
We’re excited to announce that Earthly is participating in Hacktoberfest this October. Last year’s fest saw more than 400,000 pull requests opened and thi...
Release Notes: Introduced –ssh flag for RUN which allows commands to access the ssh authentication host agent via the socket $SSH_AUTH_SOCK (fixes #292) ...
Changes New earth bootstrap command can be run to set up bash and zsh shell completion Release Page
Changes New Bash autocompletion. Installation. ( experimental ) New Docker operations no longer affected by disk performance issues. Requires use of ne...
Changes: New Interactive mode debugger via -i option (Experimental). Drops you into a shell in the container, if the build fails. New Support for Docke...
Changes: Fixes macOS-specific bug introduced in v0.2.1 related to handling of symlink SSH sockets (#61) Release Page
Changes: Fixes handling of sockets between different targets (#115) Fixes handling of symlink SSH sockets (#61) Release Page
Changes: Global configuration file for git credentials, cache location and size, no loop device, and others; see Configuration Reference in the docs for ...
Earthly v0.1.3 Released. Release Notes: Support for FROM scratch Ability to configure whether to use a loop device for cache storage Improved insta...
We live in an era of continuous delivery, containers, automation, rich set of programming languages, varying code structures (mono/poly-repos) and open-sour...
Tutorial
In 2008, I got my first job at a software-as-a-service company. We built learning management software and ran it on servers in the small data center connec...
There are many ways to deploy applications to a production server environment, and the terminology around deploy strategies is often confusing. In this shor...
Autotools is one of the most widely adopted code packaging and shipping tools available to developers on Linux. While there are alternatives, such as CMake,...
Recently, I made some contributions to the continuous integration process for Jekyll. Jekyll is a static site generator created by GitHub and written in Ru...