Sion's Blog

So, I have to admit, I’ve been somewhat frustrated with my printer recently.

Synology DS1019+ I have to admit, despite also backing up to Backblaze I was quite nervous about moving my data from one machine to another.

I don’t know if it’s the lack of sleep ( I have a newborn in the house) or if this genuinely was a tough project, but I finally got everything working after five evenings of hacking.

Whenever I approach an automation task, I always ask myself is it worth it.

tl;dr I discuss how I installed a glass bed, silent board (v.1.1.5) and BLTouch.

This article was first published on my clients company blog.

I often get asked what “Good” looks like, and I find it a tough question to answer because “Good” wears many faces.

Bio Hi, I’m Sion (pronounced the same as Sean/Shaun), and I’ve been immersed in the world of software engineering for over 20 years, even before formal education honed my skills.

Introduction There’s a great buzz with my client at the moment, and I think it’s because they’re finally taking Agile seriously.

I’ve seen two styles of transformation since entering my DevOps career; wholesale (such as what we’ve seen in Government with the Government Digital Standards) and incrementally, or one team at a time.

I first wrote this blog when I was working at City Science Why do we need CI?

I admit it; I’m impulsive.

Engineering Management for the Rest of Us by Sarah Drasner A very people focussed Engineering Management book that will be a great resource for those who are just starting Engineering Management.

The Art of Monitoring By James Turnbull and Sid Orlando The stages are: Manual, user-initiated, or no monitoring Reactive Proactive Checks will also focus on measuring application performance and business outcomes rather than just stock concerns like disk…

Leading the Transformation: Applying Agile and DevOps Principles at Scale By Gary Gruver, Tommy Mouser, and Gene Kim traditional organizations are finding it more and more difficult to compete in the marketplace and deliver the software innovations that t…

Issue I have a Sonar server configured with HTTPS and want to configure the SonarQube plugin in Jenkins to use it My job fails to build because of the following exception with the Sonar Scanner: 10:05:19.726 ERROR: Error during SonarQube Scanner execution…

I first wrote this blog when I was working at City Science Why we need a private conda channel Here at City Science we build a large number of reusable Python modules.

Lean Enterprise: How High Performance Organizations Innovate at Scale By Jez Humble, Joanne Molesky, and Barry O’Reilly Software has three characteristics which enable this kind of rapid innovation.

While working with a new client who had some green developers, it struck me that they only knew about 20% (totally arbitrary for this example) of the features of the tool they were using daily.

A curated list of awesome Jenkins reusable pipeline code. jenkinsci fabric8.io buildit Invoca Docker team Funkwerk Spring Cloud kitconcept SAP

I was faced with the task of enabling the remote API for Docker.

Sometimes I get carried away with git and its high power features.

Here’s how I made the switch from sbt to gradle for a play project.

As engineers we’re constantly trawling through logs.

I needed to move a bunch of files from an old blog to the new one for conversion.

As software engineers we’re all guilty of using ticketing systems as expensive todo lists.

Spinning up more than one Vagrant box can be slow and tedious.

Good Strategy/Bad Strategy: The difference and why it matters By Richard Rumelt The core of strategy work is always the same: discovering the critical factors in a situation and designing a way of coordinating and focusing actions to deal with those facto…

Problem I had an issue today where I was working with Jenkins and my release package was given the same name as the Jenkins job.

Anything Assigned to Me Personally This filter picks up any items that slip through the built in filter. assignee = currentUser() AND status !

The Microservice For this tutorial I’m going to use a spring boot application that will help us prove the concepts behind this tutorial.

Part 3 - a bit of back pedaling After thinking about the ‘hack’ I put in to get Puppet installed on the box before I could use it, I felt a little dirty, and decided that maybe Puppet wasn’t the best decision after-all.

task myTask(type: GradleBuild) { } If you have ever imported another build using apply from: "${rootDir}/gradle/publish.gradle" then you will appreciate how its a little difficult to know exactly what has been applied to your build by said apply action.

Intro to part 2 In the first part of this tutorial, we showed how to use Vagrant to automate and manage an Amazon EC2 instance.

Vagrant How to deploy on Amazon EC2 with Vagrant Automated Deployment of AWS EC2 Instances With Vagrant and Puppet Docker baseimage-docker Noteworthy devops bookmarks

Microservices are all the rage at the moment, but from my experience they just move the bottleneck.

Dependency management has come a long way over the past 10 years, but I believe it has some way to go before we can say the problem is solved.

Worth a look I was just watching a PuppetLabsInc video on YouTube which had Michael Stankhe presenting Getting Started with Puppet.

Reading a Maven POM is Easy with Gradle and Groovy!

Install MongoDB with Homebrew $ brew install mongodb $ mkdir -p /data/db Set permissions for the data directory Ensure that user account running mongod has correct permissions for the directory: $ sudo chmod 0755 /data/db $ sudo chown $USER /data/db Run…

Ok, so this one had me stumped for a while and the solution was extremely simple.

When you start working with distributed domains there will come a time when you need to pack the domain and unpack it in its distributed areas.