Stop Using Pie-Charts
What’s Wrong With Pie Charts Humans have a hard time comparing areas. Try it for yourself: Which slice is the largest? Which is the smallest? Can yo...
Archive of Tutorials
Command Line JSON Client In Golang
I’m an experienced software developer learning Golang by building an activity tracker1. I want a low-effort way to track my physical activity, and building ...
Effective Error Handling in Golang
Error handling in Go is a little different than other mainstream programming languages like Java, JavaScript, or Python. Go’s built-in errors don’t contain ...
The Complete Guide to Docker Secrets
Even if you’ve used Docker for your smaller or locally developed software, you might find that it can be daunting for more complex tasks. This can especiall...
Building a Golang JSON HTTP Server
If you want to build a simple JSON HTTP web service that runs natively on a Linux server, then Golang is a great choice. At least this is what I’ve been tol...
Chef vs. Docker for Builds and Deployments
Docker and Chef are two popular tools in the development world and are used extensively in build and deployment pipelines. However, even though they are use...
Comparing Container Runtimes: containerd vs. Docker
You can’t have a conversation about modern infrastructure technology without talking about containers. They provide a simple, secure way to package, distrib...
Podman: The Rootless Docker Alternative
For many developers, Docker was their first exposure to the wonderful world of containers. Containers have changed the way we develop and ship software, and...
Kubernetes vs. Docker for Local Development
You may be wondering, given that Docker is a containerization platform and Kubernetes is a containerization platform orchestrator, how can the two be compar...
Property-Based Testing In Go
Have you ever wanted your unit tests written for you? Property based testing is a powerful testing technique that, in a sense, is just that. You describe th...
Exploring Travis CI Alternatives
Travis CI is one of the best known continuous integration (CI) tools on the market. It was founded in 2011 to automate builds and tests for Ruby, but now su...
Using Spinnaker for Kubernetes Deployments
Kubernetes has become the standard for deploying and managing containerized applications, but there are a lot of questions to be answered in the cloud nativ...
Jenkins Deployment Stages and Pipelines
The software release cycle has developed over time, from the days of moving code from one machine to another to see if it works (which was frequently error-...
Using AWK with CSV Files
When the AWK tutorial came out, one of the questions on hacker news was how you use AWK with CSV (comma-separated value) files. The thing that prevents a...
Setting up Your First AWS Lambda Deployment for a Node Application
AWS Lambda is a cloud computing solution that allows you to execute your backend applications without having to worry about server configurations or mainte...
Using Octopus Deploy to Simplify Complex Deployments
Deployment is an integral part of the software development life cycle. It is the process where the application’s codebase is compiled, run through a series ...
Using ArgoCD for Kubernetes Deployments
Kubernetes has simplified the container management process for microservice applications, but developers often face challenges when using this notoriously c...
Azure Functions Deployment for Node.js Developers
Deploying an application once meant provisioning a virtual machine, ensuring security protocols were in place, and installing the required frameworks—a comp...
Understanding Bash Variables
Bash is not just a UNIX shell, it’s also a programming language. And like most programming languages, it has variables. You use these shell variables when...
Bash String Manipulation
One thing that bash is excellent at is manipulating strings of text. If you’re at the command line or writing a small script, then knowing some bash string...
Using Travis CI with Bitbucket
CI/CD (continuous integration / continuous delivery) helps development teams optimize software quality tests before delivering committed changes into produc...
Bitbucket Continuous Integration Options Compared
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...
How I Saved $5,000/mo with a $5 Droplet
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 ...
Understanding AWK
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...
Setting Up an iOS Continuous Integration Pipeline
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...
Makefile Tutorials and Examples to Build From
Building software is a multi-step process—installing or updating dependencies, compiling the source code, testing, installing, and so on. In any moderately ...
Understanding and Using Makefile Flags
make is a commonplace utility in the development world. It automates the process of generating executables, documentations, and other non-source files from ...
An Introduction to JQ
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...
Plotting Precipitation with Python, Pandas and Matplotlib
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 to Convert from JSON to CSV at The Command Line
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...
Building in Visual Studio Code with a Makefile
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...
Using Continuous Testing in DevOps Workflows
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...
6 Command Line Tools for Productive Programmers
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...
Install matplotlib In A Docker Container
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...
Creating a Golang Makefile
Building and testing any large codebase is time-consuming, error-prone, and repetitive. Golang supports multi-platform builds, which is excellent, but it n...
Beating TimSort at Merging
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...
Creating a Python Makefile
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 ...
Python Concatenate Lists
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...
Creating a G++ Makefile
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 ...
Linting Markdown And Documentation
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...
Creating and hosting your own rpm packages and yum repo
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...
Git Branching Strategies and The Greek Revival
Some modern development practices are easiest to understand from a historical perspective: things started a certain way, and then steps were added or remove...
Creating and hosting your own deb packages and apt repo
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...
Achieving Repeatability in Continuous Integration
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 Best Practices for Backward and Forward Compatibility
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...
Understanding Docker Multistage Builds
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...
DOS Gaming In Docker
Distributing shareware from the 90’s in modern Docker images.
Building a Monorepo with Bazel
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...
Understanding Docker Networking
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...
Building a Real-Time Application in the Phoenix Framework with Elixir
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...
Addressing Slow Performance in Jenkins
There’s nothing more frustrating than a sluggish continuous integration system. It slows down feedback loops and prevents code from reaching production quic...
Understanding Bash
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 ...
Compiling Containers - Dockerfiles, LLVM, and BuildKit
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...
Build Your Own Ngrok Clone With AWS
Ngrok is a tool that allows you to create secure, publically accessible URLs for your locally running code.
Understanding Docker Logging and Log Files
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...
How to Setup and Use Amazon’s Elastic Container Registry
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...
What is Buildkit?
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...
How to Man in the Middle HTTPS Using mitmproxy
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?
Encrypting Data With SSH Keys and Golang
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...
Using gRPC with Golang, Python, and Ruby
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...
Can We Build Better?
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 ...