Newsletter, Summer 2023
Inspired by a friend I’ve decided to put in some effort in order to provide with periodic(-ish) general updates. I predict these will be mostly around personal projects I’m undertaking, and will have no predefined format whatsoever. This first is about what I’ve been up to in the last 3-4 months, maybe even a bit further back. Quite a bit of life has been happening over the last two years and that has driven predictability away from the amount of...
over 1 year ago
Introducing Huey!
Today I’d like to share with you Huey, already up and running. Huey is in an ongoing experiment of mine, and it is designed to be a news reader and archiver. This software is still in its early stages. You get to see it as I’m building it. I’m not aiming at this point to make it a product, but I’d like to get it to a usable and interesting state. The name takes inspiration from the name of the...
over 1 year ago
A Reproducible Development Environment on MacOS
For long I have fought with the inconsistencies of brew that, while certainly an impressive piece of software, has made several choices in its development that had the effect of distancing it ever far from traditional package managers. A particular aspect that hurts me the most is its focus on the bleeding edge. Judging from how the community uses different managers to pin versions for the software they have installed, such as asdf or rbenv or pyenv, I don’t think...
almost 2 years ago
Escaping from Google
Google has been pulling the plug on G Suite legacy free accounts, after 10 years. To me this meant having to pay a user subscription for each domain that I have there, or resort to weird domain aliasing tricks to get the job done. As such, I’ve decided on finding an alteranative suitable email hosting. Landed on fastmail.com for now. Heard nice things about them, and tried the service out. The interface is clean, snappy and easy to use, possibly...
about 2 years ago
Instrumenting a Rails application
In the 18th of July 2019 I gave a talk at Le Wagon Lisbon about how to instrument a Rails application, using Prometheus. Since my last talk I grew fond of simple live coding demonstrations to convey practical knowledge as well as awareness that things are often easier than they seem. This time I went about gathering some system and custom metrics from an already existing application into an existing Prometheus server. The application with the end setup is available...
over 5 years ago
Email me maybe
Back in the 9th of May I did a little talk/workshop at Porto Codes where I talked about the advantages and perils of owning your own email server, the hassles with spam and protecting your domain from being flagged as an origin, and so forth. Halfway through I did a live demo where I installed a postfix/dovecot server from a clean Ubuntu installation. The purpose of this exercise was to demonstrate how easily and fast it could be done. Sure...
over 5 years ago
The 2016 15" MacBook Pro
I recently purchased the 15" version of late 2016’s MacBook Pro, their last model as of this writing. Touch bar and everything. This came as a necessity as my former laptop—another MacBook Pro—is turning 4 years old in a few months, and in dire need of some repairs and well deserved rest and repurpose. I’m not the usual review guy, but this model has been receiving a whole lot of hate all around. My expectations were very low when I...
almost 8 years ago