imiell

I’ve always been frustrated that people often talk about culture without giving actionable or realistic advice, and was previously prompted by this tweet to write about what I did when put in charge of a broken team: Then the other week I met a change management type at a dinner who’d previously worked in manufacturing, … Read more

Ignore the Noise, Go to the Signal In a former life I was a history student. I wasn’t very good at it, and one of my weaknesses was an unwillingness to cut out the second-hand nonsense and read the primary texts. I would read up on every historian’s views on (say) the events leading up … Read more

What is ‘Busting the Cache’? If you’ve ever spent any time building Docker images, you will know that Docker caches layers as they are built, and as long as those lines don’t change, Docker treats the outputted layer is identical There’s a problem here. If you go to the network to pick up an artefact, … Read more

If you have worked your way in software for a number of years and you’re not a security specialist, you might be occasionally confronted by someone from ‘security’ who generally says ‘no’ to things you deliver. For a long time I was in this position and was pretty bewildered by how to interpret what they … Read more

Most people who use Linux pretty quickly learn about man pages, and how to navigate them with their preferred pager (usually less these days). Less well known are the info pages. If you’ve never come across them, these look like man pages, and contain similar information, but are invoked like this: info grep Over the … Read more

A couple of days ago I got access to GitHub Actions in Beta. I felt vaguely interested in it when I briefly read up on it, but now I’m like Holt geeking out on Moneyball: This is not a considered post, so may contain errors, both egregious and small. I’ll edit them if I’m corrected. … Read more

Intro Most guides to bash history shortcuts exhaustively list all of the shortcuts available to you. The problem I always had with that was that I would use them once, and then glaze over as I tried out all the possibilities. Then I’d move onto my working day and completely forget them, retaining only the … Read more

This piece seeks to answer a simple question: how long would it take for enough people to die that the Brexit decision would be reversed? This has been informally speculated on before, but I haven’t seen any analysis done on the numbers, so I decided to do it myself. The tl;dr is that the turning … Read more

After 6 years, I removed Docker from all my home servers. apt purge -y docker-ce Why? This was triggered by a recurring incident I faced where the Docker daemon was using 100% CPU on multiple cores that made the host effectively unusable. This had happened a few times before, and was likely due to a … Read more

Continuing in the series of posts about lesser-known bash features, here I take you through seven variables that bash makes available that you may not have known about. 1) PROMPT_COMMAND You might already know that you can manipulate your prompt to show all sorts of useful information, but what fewer people know is that you … Read more