I don’t think I ever copied more vim or zsh configuration from anyone than from ChrisAtMachine. Looks like I found a soulmate. 😊 His YouTube channel is well worth watching!

→ Read more...

Not counting IoT devices and the Raspberry Pi in my PiDP-11, I haven’t had a Linux machine at home for more than 10 years. End of last year, I decided to get a dedicated Linux box under my desk again so I can enjoy the full Linux experience when I do software and infrastructure engineering.

→ Read more...

Well-structured status lines in vim and shell prompts with version control symbols are a nice quality-of-life improvement. Unfortunately, not all monospace fonts come with the necessary PowerLine glyphs. For example, my favourite font is Operator Mono, and it too doesn’t have PowerLine symbols built in.

→ Read more...

A big chunk of my work time in recent weeks has been going into getting Netdata set up to monitor our server fleet. Where we already have it in place, it’s an amazing help in investigating resources issues and bottlenecks. I’m looking forward to getting alerts about issues that might occur soon. Well, I don’t look forward to getting alerts, but I’d rather be alerted about risks when they’re building up than when they already hit. And that’s what Netdata is going to make possible by extrapolating historic data.

→ Read more...

I’ve just returned from our summer vacation. I spent two weeks visiting friends and family in Germany; my wife and kids are staying for one week more. On one hand, it’s always nice to see people again. On the other hand, I spent even more time in between get-togethers alone in our guest room than I usually do to recharge my introvert batteries because of the ongoing pandemic and the dubious behaviour of so many people. I’m longing for a future in which I don’t have to fear for my health anymore while travelling.

→ Read more...

The latest RubyTapas tutorial taught me the difference between the dotenv and direnv tools. While they have significant overlap, they complement each other quite nicely. dotenv simplifies both development and production ops by importing environments variables either from a .env file or the application hosting platform. direnv on the other hand augments the dev environment even further; not only can it add dev-only variables but also modify shell settings like extending $PATH on a per-project basis.

→ Read more...

System upgrade complete. 💉

→ Read more...

That’s what I keep preaching to my team but still fail at myself every so often.

→ Read more...

It’s fun to follow in the footsteps of @isotopp getting acquainted with Windows 10. In a recent post, he explained how to set up multiple keyboard layouts, a necessary task when you’re switching between ANSI for coding and German for writing.

→ Read more...

After all these years, it still doesn’t stop being fun when articles like “How I navigate tmux in 2021” teach me a few tiny bits to improve my setup.

→ Read more...