Recently I picked up this book on my travels: This is the second edition (1970) of a book originally published in 1965. It’s a fascinating insight into the state of computing 50 years ago, and remarkably prescient. Here’s a few highlights that piqued my interest. Getting programs right This is a fascinating insight into how … Read more
tl;dr An automated setup of a Chef infrastructure ready to develop on. Can be used to: Develop cookbooks offline Train users in Chef Simulate Chef ‘search’ code (the original impetus) Test cookbooks Known to work on Mac and Linux. Requires: Vagrant Virtualbox Vagrant landrush plugin vagrant plugin install landrush ShutIt – [sudo] pip install shutit Video … Read more
Intro One of the ironies of working a lot with Docker, Kubernetes, and OpenShift is that I’ve had to learn a lot about Vagrant and Virtualbox. Mostly I use it to spin up OpenShift clusters on my local machine, but I’ve had to poke into lots of corners to get various other things working too. … Read more
Overview 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 four years ago, got it going in a relatively small corp (700 employees) in a relatively unregulated environment. This was great fun: we set up our own … Read more
Container Networking is Hard Enough… To those not versed in the dark networking arts, one of the mysteries of OpenShift (RedHat’s wrapper around Kubernetes) is how a pod communicates with the outside world. This article is more about DNS on clusters, but the point is the same: things can get pretty complicated pretty quickly. Let’s … Read more
What is Puppeteer? Puppeteer is another headless Chrome library, this time maintained by the Chrome DevTools team. You can play with it online here. The api is here. Examples are here. Docker Image I’ve created a Docker image of it so you can get playing with it. The image is available on the Docker Hub: … Read more
Sapiens and Collective Fictions Recently I read Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Harari. The basic thesis of the book is that humans require ‘collective fictions’ so that we can collaborate in larger numbers than the 150 or so our brains are big enough to cope with by default. Collective fictions are things that don’t … Read more
Intro Over time I’ve built up a few different small applications which do simple things like track share prices, or track whether a particular file has changed on GitHub. Little apps that only I use. While building these I’ve come to use an unorthodox application patterns that allow me to run them ‘serverless’ and without … Read more
tl;dr This article shows you how you can use OpenShift to set up and test against AWS APIs using localstack. Example code to run through this using ShutIt is available here. Here’s an asciicast of the process: Introduction In this walkthrough you’re going to set up an OpenShift system using minishift, and then run … Read more
For those of us obsessed with automation, the PhantomJS library was manna from heaven, allowing you to programmatically automate web interactions against a ‘real’ web browser without need a screen to interact with. Earlier this year, the principal maintainer announced that he was stepping down from the project in favour of ‘Headless Chrome’. Headless Chrome is … Read more