Introduction I am building a software project currently where the development focus is on a service layer that is not web-based. However, to visualise and iterate upon the work, I decided that I needed a simple web interface. Even though this contains nearly no business logic, even the simplest of CRUD websites can exhibit regressions, […]

I have lately been editing questions on Stack Overflow quite a bit. It’s my equivalent of doodling on a notepad, or idly completing a crossword: editing is my little non-taxing pastime that benefits future readers and helps illustrate the community’s desire for post authors to put some effort into their posts. Over the years, I […]

I’ve been keen to move some of my web services from CI to CD recently, and I was keen to see if it could be done using zero-downtime techniques. In other words, I wanted to run a minimum of two instances, to restart each one independently, and then to use a networking system to route […]

Setting up deploy keys is not something one does very often, and accordingly when one comes to do it, it’s something that needs to be looked up from piecemeal locations on the internet! Thus, as an aide memoire for me and anyone who wants it, here is what I do. Create a key pair. I […]

Introduction Over the last year or so I have taken a sabbatical from working on other people’s projects to work on my own, and while I have discussed them in other fora, it seems sensible for me to put them down here. As it happens, I have various people interested in my recent work anyway, […]

As documented in some of my past posts, I’ve been using Docker on CircleCI a lot recently, and I thought it was about time I investigated adding Docker layer caching to the mix. This is one of Docker’s best features, in my view: if a layer does not need building, because the command and the […]

Introduction Over the last six months, I’ve been working on a microservices-oriented application, and it has reached a level of complexity that means I could not do without the tests I have written. My tests are not perfect, and there’s times when I’ve plumped for slow functional tests when fast unit tests would have been […]

Introduction When I first started maintaining “play” servers on the internet, in order to run my own blog and various software projects, the build process was long and laborious. That would have been around 2009, and at that time I was working for corporate logistics provider whose Disaster Recovery time was measured in days, not […]

Introduction I’ve just made use of a Docker multi-stage build when Dockerising my WordPress blog, and I thought it would be useful to examine the benefits. Multi-stage builds are a nice way of being able to do build fragments in order to selectively copy pieces into the output build. Here’s a cut-down example: There are […]

Yes, the title is largely click-bait, but with good reason. I am presently using Code Fresh as my Docker registry, but I’m not really a fan of their service. I have therefore been spending a great deal of search-engine time on finding a replacement for my (unfunded) tech projects, to little avail. Free is of […]

I’ve been following various online tutorials in order to pair my Linux laptop (running Mint) with my Raspberry Pi 3 running Raspbian, using BlueTooth. I wanted to add a couple of extra instructions to the Internet’s wealth of knowledge, as I’ve had some hurdles that I’ve not spotted mentioned elsewhere. My first problem was that […]

I’ve been meaning to get an SSL certificate for the blog for some time, and prompted by how cheap they now are, I have finally set it up. All HTTP links should still be valid, but will redirect to their HTTPS equivalent. The switch is mainly to protect my credentials when I am logging on […]

I recently completed a small TypeScript project in CDK, which deployed a lambda and an API Gateway to AWS. The deployed code was pretty simple, but I found the CDK difficult as I’d not done any TypeScript before. I am on home turf with PHP, and I wondered if it would be possible to write […]

Now that she’s older, my cat has recently been accumulating a number of medications she needs to take, and it is getting hard to keep track of them. Some of them are essential, and need to be taken at a specified time; some are good to have, and can be taken at any time. Some […]

Introduction As a person who is both scatter-brained and busy, I’ve gone through various ways of organising my time. For over a decade, I have maintained an electronic mobile-phone calendar, so I can get reminders of where I need to be and when. I like this, and plan to carry on doing it; it ain’t […]

I have recently been pondering a way to keep track of purchases for my bicycles. Some of these are components for the bikes themselves (e.g. a new wheel after one was stolen), and some are attachments (bike lights, clothing). My use case is to get a view of: What my total cost of ownership is […]

Introduction I’ve noticed several things with Docker registries: The APIs to interrogate them are either cumbersome, unfinished, or usually only partially implemented Free private registries are rarely found on the web, probably because of the cost of storage and data transfer GitLab are one of the few providers that offer free registry access, but today […]

I have some integration tests for a system that deploys PHP software to an Apache host via FTP(S) and SSH/SFTP transports. The tests run in a Docker image that has FTP and SSH servers installed, and they are stopped and started using shell scripts. This is a bit hacky, and it does not offer much […]

I see there is a ready-made [WordPress Docker image](https://store.docker.com/images/wordpress) available, and I’m sure it is very good. However, I like my version, since it pulls in the latest versions of the required plugins and themes, and deletes themes and plugins that are not in use. It’d be great to set up a simple JS app […]

I recently donated some money to a small web-based charity, which accepts Paypal payments and electronic bank transfers. Whilst I have no fears that the charity misspends any donations, I realised after giving that I had no idea how the money had been spent. This particular organisation is run by over-worked volunteers, and whilst I […]