Tuesday, Mar 11, 2025
Quite excitingly, I have just about gotten around to tagging v6.0.0 of my docker-ansible project (Ansible (of all flavours š¦) in Docker images (of all flavours š¦). The latest change has made a massive uptick in amount of container images available as they are now all available on armv8 (for all the Graviton or Mac users).
Interestingly enough, I think that this might be the first major change that wasn’t actually made (and probably broken) by me, so a huge acknowledgement of my Epam colleague Pavel Pikta for assisting in the move from GitLab CI to GitHub Actions.
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Wednesday, Mar 5, 2025
Interesting perspective on Should Managers Still Code. I have moved less away from day-to-day coding (probably throughout my late 20s to early 30s), however, I always try to stay engaged. In fact, I probably have a greater breadth of coding experience now, despite the fact that I don’t write hundreds, or thousands of lines a month now.
I love the concept that you still understand how the code works and how it is being delivered, but for me it is as much about staying out of the way and not interrupting expert flow, whilst still being able to give guidance and assistance when needed.
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Thursday, Nov 21, 2024
How true is it that “security is everyone’s responsibility”? I know that in principle this is true but in practice it is exceptionally hard for everyone to understand the context and overall risk.
I was reading yesterday about DevOps being not an easy entry to working in IT as there is often a large amount of different and separated tools that are required. And I had a large discussion with a friend recently about how the industry has become very specialised. When I started developing/engineering, I would often know a bit about lots of things; PHP, Python, Javascript, Server Admin, Networking. Whereas now we almost require experts in a small sub-section of this (Javascript to React to Next.js). But how can you understand security context if you are super-specialised in one area?
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Thursday, May 9, 2024
Thereās a quiet little ritual I find myself doing whenever Iām asked to enter a date of birth into an online formāespecially when I donāt want to give away my real one. No, I donāt go for something obviously fake like “01/01/1900” or use my pet’s birthday. Instead, I go straight for January 1st, 1970. Not because itās plausible. Not because itās subtle. But because itās the start of the Unix timestamp, and somewhere deep down, I hope it confuses their database just a little.
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Tuesday, Apr 9, 2024
It often seems like weāre caught in an endless cycle of redefining roles and disciplines within techāDevOps, DevSecOps, Platform Engineering, Site Reliability Engineering, Cloud Engineeringāeach iteration arriving every two or three years to align with the latest trend, tool, or methodology. While these evolving titles and categories attempt to capture real changes in practice and tooling, they also tend to muddy the waters. At a certain point, you start to wonder: canāt we just call all of this Software Engineering and move on?
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Tuesday, Aug 8, 2023
I still can’t get over how people code with a white background. It’s one of those things that continues to baffle me, even after years of seeing it as the default in so many tools. Sure, for quick editsālike tweaking a file in GitHub or reviewing a merge request in GitLabāit’s fine. But when it comes to sitting down and actually writing or debugging code, a bright white editor just feels wrong. It’s harsh on the eyes, especially during long sessions or in low-light environments, and it often leads to more strain and fatigue than necessary.
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Tuesday, May 16, 2023
How are you looking to augment Generative AI with inner-source and internal AI systems?
I’ve been spending a lot of time recently thinking about how we look to build internal AIs. Although ChatGPT (and similar) are all great tools for coding (code generation/completion and explanation) there is a massive amount of internal code within companies that are not part of the AI system. Aligned with that are the cultural aspects of what has been internally created, the inner source and property that companies create.
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Friday, Mar 31, 2023
What do you think about COMMIT_GUIDELINES being included in a project? Should you have a project (or central) standard for writing commits? What about Conventional Commits?
Pros:
Improves clarity across teams by making commit messages consistent and understandable. Helps with automation, like changelog generation and semantic versioning (especially with Conventional Commits). Makes code history easier to navigate and audit. Encourages thoughtful commits, which can improve code quality and documentation. Useful for onboarding new team members who can quickly understand the projectās development patterns. Cons:
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Friday, Mar 17, 2023
What would be your perfect base project on GitHub (or GitLab)? I would think it would include:
Documentation (readme, contributing, licence, changelog, security) PR/MR and Issue Templates CI/CD (Actions or GitLab CI - Superlinter? yamllint?) CODEOWNERS and options to include:
Pre-commits (?) Auto PR tools (Renovatebot?) .editorconfig or .vscode/ directory? Security (?)
Thursday, Mar 2, 2023
Just released v4.3.2 of Docker Ansible š . A few changes (rolled from previous v4.3.* releases which then were fixed over the next 2). Bringing in RockyLinux 9, Alpine 3.17 as new base images š , dropping Alpine 3.12, Alpine 3.13 and Debian Stretch as EOL š§āāļø .
I still have longer-term ambitions to move this to being multi-stage builds (with multi-architecture at some point). Multi-arch is harder just due to the build times as using linux/amd64 for runners to build linux/arm64/v8 takes a long time. š
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