TBNL

Recently I merged a pull request that was like any other pull request.

During my weekly long runs I listen to podcasts.

Introduction Over the past ten years or so, my role has gradually shifted from software to platforms.

Recently I passed the last of the exams that grants the Golden Kubestronaut title.

Past Friday I had a focus day, hardly any meetings and time to do some scheduled deep work.

Introduction Past week, I attended FastFlowConf, “a Team Topologies Conference”.

Introduction Recently I needed to test a Keycloak upgrade.

Introduction At KubeCon 2024 in Paris, CNCF introduced the Kubestronaut program.

Introduction These days, applying Infrastructure as Code (IaC) changes is typically automated by using pipelines or GitOps.

When dealing with traffic of a news site like NU.nl, one quickly learns to expect the unexpected: You know there will be traffic surges, but you can not predict when they will be.

Introduction To me, ever since occasionally needing to use it, ‘enterprise software’ is the definition of software that makes people feel unhappy.

Introduction After IBM acquired Red Hat in 2019, it recently has acquired HashiCorp.

Introduction In a presentation about CI/CD I gave recently, I briefly mentioned the 12 factor methodology.

A new year: Reflection time This article originally appeared on the Fullstaq blog As we have moved from 2023 to 2024, it is a good moment to reflect.

Introduction Feature deployments can help teams to validate work in progress, and test pull requests before merging.

Introduction Recently we were performing an EKS upgrade.

Introduction The last time Kubernetes Community Day took place in the Netherlands was September 2019.

Introduction Once or twice a year, NU.nl organizes a hackathon, allowing its IT staff to dabble in new technology and pursue ideas, usually guided by several themes. 2023 kicked off with a hackathon having the themes ‘NU2030’, ‘NU.nl from scratch’ and ‘A…

ImagePullBackOff Recently we experienced a specific ECR production image being absent that really should not have been purged by our lifecycle hooks.

Edgecase 2022: Kubernetes at the edge Finally, after the pandemic abruptly changed every meetup and conference into a video conference, in-person events are possible again!

EKS and its hunger for IP addresses Kubernetes allows running highly diverse workloads with similar effort.

Recently I worked on some infrastructure changes that resulted in terraform plan showing more, and more impactful, changes than expected.

Recently we migrated our CDNs from Cloudfront to Akamai.

Recently we discovered that what used to be a minor line in our monthly billing graph, had become several strokes wider, amounting to a couple of hundred dollars on the monthly bill.

Slides of the presentation I gave at a developer.overheid.nl meetup on the topic of moving from Kops to EKS.

Friday sept. 13th the small conference ‘Kubernetes Community Day 2019’ took place in Pakhuis de Zwijger in Amsterdam.

Slides of the presentation I gave about Kubernetes practices and learnings at NU.nl.

The end of May 2019 saw 7700 people, myself included, visit Barcelona to attend ‘KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2019’.

Since a number of months we (NU.nl development team) operate a small number of Kubernetes clusters.

Tuesday 4th and wednesday 5th the DevOps Conference 2018 took place in Munich.

TL;DR: Configure CloudFront to set the Cloudfront-Forwarded-Proto in order to allow a Django application to know the client’s request protocol.

TL;DR: It’s possible to configure HAProxy to have separate health check and service endpoints, allowing to set up different firewall rules for each.

TL;DR: PyCharm and IntelliJ have some odd defaults that can mask mistakes until they hit CI.

Until recently I relied on OS X native python for anything 2.7.x and Homebrew’s python3 for anything 3.x.x.

Introduction For some years my blog has been inactive.

The professional I’m employed as lead developer / architect of the web team of NU.nl (Part of DPG Media), the largest news site in the Netherlands.

Nowadays developing web applications usually requires a flexible process due to changing business logic, shifting priorities or new insights.

The yearly dutch PHP event is getting close so time to check out the schedule.

A while ago during a project we were asked to implement autofocus on the generic search field that every page in the application has.

A while ago I installed Zend Server Community Edition on OS X which was pretty straightforward.

Past weekend the Amsterdam RAI was the centre of the PHP universe as there the 2010 edition of the Dutch PHP Conference was held.

In my previous post about Zend_Form I showed how, using Zend_Form, a form’s structure can be separated from it’s presentation and how to use custom Decorators and Validators.

Most components of Zend Framework can be used without using the entire framework and Zend_Form is no exception.

About five months after having enjoyed server-side talks at DPC09 it was now time for front-end matters: Fronteers 2009.

PHP Exceptions can greatly assist in implementing various error scenario’s into an application.

In software development projects, paying proper attention to usability aspects, can greatly help ‘getting the message functionality across’.

Yesterday (sept. 29th) I went to the Freshheads office in Tilburg to attend the monthly PHPBenelux meeting.

When doing client-side developing there are times that jQuery’s get-this-do-that nature doesn’t provide all that is needed.

In a recent project I’ve been working on, we have used the ‘Domain Model‘ to describe and design our application.

The biggest PHP event in Holland is over.