marco.ninja - Blog Feed

I love drawing things, especially in Excalidraw!

It is no secret that I’m no big fan of GitHub and it’s dominance in the VCS-ecosystem.

Over the holidays I’ve been diving deep into build systems in general and container builds in particular.

I recently rebuilt my blog from scratch, see the previous post in this series.

I’ve been blogging in one form or another for 5 years now.

You can overwrite hugo configuration values with environment variables!

JSON does not natively support comments, which is OK, but sometimes a comment could really help.

Usually at least one of those is present on any system top htop / another top variant ps But sometimes the usual suspects are not available, especially in minimal containers.

Kubernetes resources have quite a lot of lists in them and replacing an item in such lists is quite easy using kustomize patches with op: replace.

There are loads of better ways to do this using Google Search Console / Bing Webmaster Tools / ahrefs and similar tools.

Git is hard: screwing up is easy, and figuring out how to fix your mistakes is fucking impossible.

Building custom domains for your SaaS is not always easy, especially when certificates get involved.

I had the pleasure of joining Dave McAllister, Senior Open Source Technologist for NGINX, on the NGINX Community Chats to talk about tech playground.

Colorize a pattern in the given input using a neat regex and colorization hack in grep ($ matching all lines but not being able to be highlighted). color () { # Color highlight the pattern in the incoming stream, writing to stdout # This effectively m…

kubeswitch (lazy: switch) is the single pane of glass for all of your kubeconfig files.

Install a pip package from a git repo, using a specified git reference:

Hand-drawn 2D & 3D illustrations, icons and animations.

DNS is something so fundamental to most of our systems functioning that it’s often overlooked in initial troubleshooting, it’s also incredibly hard to troubleshoot if it’s only intermittently failing.

Doing local development on a bunch of interconnected services I often want to start multiple long running server processes.

When working with multiple Kubernetes clusters and namespaces switching context can be a chore.

I often find myself replacing an existing MVP based on static html with a Django app, or just needing to preserve some old URL scheme.

Many of my scripts work with temporary files, usually relative to the scripts directory1, while at the same time using set -e to exit as soon as something fails.

In many CI/CD workflows interfacing with Hashicorp Vault is required.

Coming from NGINX and others the concept of a maintenance mode that can be manually enabled is something I have used many times before.

On Linux/Unix/MacOS: find . | grep " " On Windows: Get-ChildItem -Path "."

A sticky footer using [[picocss]] html, body { height: 100vh; } body > footer { position: sticky; top: 100vh; }

When using Renovate it can sometimes be required to run a specific manager only on a sub-set of the matching files.

By default HAProxy resolves all DNS names in it’s config on startup and then never again.

When doing variable substitution with sed things break if the value contains the delimiter used by sed.

Most of these should work the same with any OCI compliant client.

For some reason Microsoft, in their infinite wisdom, decided to no longer support moving the taskbar to other edges of the screen with Windows 11.

fileName="my-file.yaml" find .

Often times we need the current date (and time) when scripting inside bash or other shells.

This is a simple script that takes multiple kube config files and deeply merges them into one.

Sometimes it is useful to wait for a port to be closed, for example when updating an app that can’t always properly be shut down using other Ansible modules.

My preferred minimalistic CSS framework, which is usually enough for small websites and even simple SaaS apps.

Often times when writing scripts I want to reference files in the same directory, but keep the script portable in case it is part of a git repository being checked out somewhere else or just the folder getting moved.

I was recently doing a lot of layouting pages to later be printed, so showing how big certain elements are was of help to me.

A while back I built tech-playground.com, which I describe like this: A playground that runs your config on real servers for you, a bit like CodePen for server tech.

Using flex children can easily be positioned vertically in their parent container.

When debugging issues with CSS layouts it can sometimes be tricky to really understand what is going on.

I often find myself wanting a simple copy button in my web projects.

Sometimes, when working with externally generated content you might want to make links clickable when rendering it in the client.

Debugging container workloads can be a challenge sometimes, especially when running them in k8s, behind a reverse proxy or in other, possibly complex, traffic flow scenarios.

Sometimes, mostly when throwing together a quick idea or MVP, it can be useful to just register all models with the admin and leave proper customization for later.

How to add things to a list using kustomize.