imiell

Deck from my [Contain] meetup talk available here Video here

Introduction Recently I have been playing with Terraform. It’s a lot of fun. I had a little project that was perfect for it, but ran into a problem. Most examples of Terraform usage assume that your environments are static. So layouts like this are not uncommon: terraform_folder/ modules/ myproject/main.tf myproject/vars.tf live/ main.tf stage/ main.tf dev/ … Read more

tl;dr Ever start a bash script, then wish you’d started it in python? Use this Docker image to convert your script. Introduction I routinely use both bash and python to quickly whip up tools for short and long-term uses. Generally I start with a bash script because it’s so fast to get going, but as … Read more

  Introduction Unikernels are a relatively new concept to most people in IT, but have been around for a while. They are operating system running as VMs under a hypervisor, but are: Single-purpose Only use the libraries they need A unikernel might not have networking (for example) Built from a set of available libraries which are … Read more

Overview [A video of me talking about this is available here] Docker is extremely popular with developers, having gone as a product from zero to pretty much everywhere in a few years. I started tinkering with Docker three years ago, got it going in a relatively small corp (700 employees) in a relatively unregulated environment. This … Read more

This is a video going over some of Docker’s new features.   It: Builds an image with the new HEALTHCHECK dockerfile command Creates a docker swarm Creates a service Scales the service to two instances Removes the service   The code for it is here. My book Docker in Practice  Get 39% off with the … Read more

‘git log’ Graphing Recently I’ve become responsible for a large project with lots of branches and a complex history I frequently need to dig into. I prefer to work on the command line, so ended up exploring various git log options. I haven’t found a good write-up of these, so here is my attempt at … Read more

  About once every few months I have to set up a reverse tunnel. I’ve learned the hard way to not read the man page, and just wing it. After setting one up the other day I looked at the man page to see if it made sense whilst having a picture of its operating … Read more

Writing a Technical Book It’s over! Seventeen months after signing the contract, I hold our book in my hands! A lot of people have asked me about our experiences writing the book, whether it was ‘worth it’, how much work it was, whether I’d do it again, and should they do one. I remember googling … Read more

Interactive Git Tutorials Following on from my earlier post on practising grep, this post shows two tutorials you can run on the command line to gain familiarity and get practice in with git bisect and rebase in a realistic and safe way. They use Docker and ShutIt to help manage state in safe and lightweight … Read more