Nick Charlton

I’ve been building up a nice pattern for bootstrapping Jenkins’ secrets through init.groovy.d, storing the secrets themselves inside configuration management.

I got a fun new toy this week: The new iPad Pro.

Just after the last Week Notes post, I published a short one on configuring Jenkins’ email-ext plugin.

Ubuntu 20.04 — which was released few days ago (23rd April) — brings with it a new installer, replacing the previous Debian installer with subiquity.

The default email notifications provided by Jenkins are a little inflexible, but the email-ext plugin adds a whole host of configuration options.

A little while ago, thoughtbot added a new team lead role and I started that a week ago when we rolled that out into our London office.

Double digits!

This was the first full week of working from home for me in years.

This was the week where Coronavirus/COVID-19 mitigations really stepped up, especially for people (like me!)

Last week, I released a new version of administrate-field-nested_has_many, These last two weeks have been interesting in that there’s been lots going on …and none of that I can publish.

With Storm Ciara bringing wind gusts of up to 60mph, I ended up not cycling all week.

Some things are a blessing in disguise: we started the week blocked on our current piece of work, which after the hectic week previously really helped, This was because we were blocked on everything as the feature we’re working on depends on an API, which…

I decided to skip last week’s.

New office, new cycle route for the first half of the week.

Started on a new project this week.

Several people I follow post #weeknotes, which I’ve always found a particularly interesting insight into what people are doing.

I don’t do many things frontend these days, but I’ve wanted to try out Tailwind for a while, and I finally had the opportunity.

How can you do token authentication with Rails out of the box?

I’m starting on a Go project for the first time in a while, and a few people have asked me how to starting writing Go.

I’ve been using Terraform for just about four years at this point, but outside working with other organisations’ configuration, I’ve not sat down and built something from scratch since the very beginning.

I’ve been playing around with Kubernetes a bunch recently, especially with Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE).

Whilst I do spend most of my time writing code, I’m also a consultant.

CircleCI 2.0 brings some great new features, but it’s not so straightforward to get started with.

2017 was a tough one.

I now co-host a podcast!

If starting to co-host Build Phase wasn’t enough, Chad Pytel and I did a WWDC cross-over episode of Giant Robots, the main company podcast.

I have a collection of macOS machines, some of which are used for services like Jenkins and others which are used for testing.

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been building up a box running ESXi 6 to host a bunch of virtual machines.

ESXi is a funny beast when it comes to SSH keys, and there’s a lot of misinformation about on how to configure them persistently, not to mention security FUD.

Hetzner are a relatively low-cost hosting provider based out of Germany.

I have a particular preference for the size of my browser window, and I like them all to be consistent.

I regularly work with production data (obfuscated when necessary) with local Rails apps.

On the site, Docker recommend using the Docker Toolbox to get up and running with it.

Ubuntu uses bazaar as it’s source control system, with Launchpad as the hosting service.

I’m currently in the process of designing out the architecture for a project which is soon to be hosted on AWS.

Jenkins is a continuous integration (CI) server written in Java.

I have a hosted Mac mini with Macminicolo that I use for a range of things, but predominantly as a build server for boxes and other projects (which require something like Xcode).

Picture the scene: You’ve got a hosted Mac somewhere on the internet, you connect to it via a VPN to access the services you host on it, but you’d like to use domains to refer to these and have them look up correctly.

Rack is the (excellent) common denominator web library for Ruby.

I seem to do a lot with Virtual Machines and this was no different.

Sometimes, ActiveRecord queries can get pretty complex, especially if you’re implementing a feature like search over a typical “index” page that also has pagination and the term itself is optional.

I usually use Postmark for outgoing transactional email, I find this to be better than expecting the underlying system to have a correctly configured sendmail and it helps with deliverability.

Sinatra is a cool little framework for building web tools in Ruby.

I’ve just released a new RubyGem which makes caching objects (and allowing them to expire) in Redis easy.

Pandoc has a huge set of extensions which are not enabled by default and whilst Hakyll does enable quite a few in its own options (like footnotes), I wanted to add support for definition lists.

If you’re reading this, it means that I successfully rolled-out the fourth1 version of this site.

There’s a couple of (client) projects which I maintain which have been in existence for quite a while (one still has full iOS 5 support and hopefully we’ll be able to drop that soon), but they’re still well maintained and have reasonable test suites that…

I’ve been doing a few things with Ruby which involve controlling and responding to long-running processes, where the Ruby-based ‘wrapper’ takes the task of automating something which is otherwise quite complex.

Introduction For at least the past three years, I’ve been reading Chris Guillebeau’s Annual Review series.

Alex Payne looks at the alternatives to his current setup and draws some conclusions.