Baptiste Fontaine’s Blog

I’ve never taken cocaine or any other similar drug, but I imagine it as something that makes you a lot more productive at the cost of destroying your body and making it impossible to stop.

When I started this blog 13 years ago*, I went with Octopress, a framework built on top of Jekyll with nice defaults.

In 2023 I wrote only one article on this blog, but a few more on the tech blog of the company I currently work for, Bixoto: Deploy Mattermost on Dokku Add Let’s Encrypt SSL Certificates on Private Domains with Dokku Always encode your Requests payloads in…

When using any library for Google Cloud you can specify a service account with GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS, but unfortunately that doesn’t work when using gsutil in shell scripts.

For the past three years I’ve been running a Twitter bot called @lemondeadit, a French equivalent of @NYT_first_said which tweets new words as they appear in the French newspaper Le Monde.

Python added support for type hints in 3.5.

While working with Magento 2.3.6 on Bixoto I hit a weird issue: the bin/magento command-line tool was always eating all the RAM, even with a simple command: $ .

While following a tutorial to install Virtualbox in order to have docker working on macOS, I hit an issue where the docker-machine create command fails with an error that looks like this: VBoxManage: error: Failed to create the host-only adapter VBoxManag…

Code-Golf is the art of writing the shortest program in a given language that implements some given algorithm.

For the latest StackExchange “time”-themed contest, I made a gif showing the evolution of StackOverflow from 2008 to today: (click on the image to play it again) The first step was to find a decent API for the Internet Archive.

Two weeks ago I created and put online a box plot of 73k movies durations across the time.

Mattermost is a Slack-like self-hosted and open-source alternative.

You’ve probably read this instruction quite a few times in online tutorials about installing command-line tools.

This post title sounds like a spam email subject but I was asked twice in the past three weeks where I buy my t-shirts, so here’s an answer that everybody can benefit from.

For a lot of people, the GNU tar command’s options seem obscure and hard to use.

This is the first post of a serie I’m starting about syntax quirks in various languages.

ES6 does provide modules; but unless you’re using Babel you’ll have to rely on third-party libraries such as RequireJS until all major browsers support them.

The easiest and most popular Bash pranks involve someone messing up with your ~/.bashrc.

I started learning Python four years ago and have been heavily programming with it for near than a year now.

Command-T is a wonderful Vim plugin which allows you to open files with a minimal number of keystrokes.

When I started writing Clojure, I couldn’t memorize the difference between conj and cons and always used one instead of the another.

When plotting with gnuplot-py on OSX, I got an annoying warning saying that terminal aqua is unknown or ambiguous, even when I use a different terminal (e.g. postscript).

Coveralls is a service that keep track of your tests coverage for you.

Black-box testing is a method of software testing that examines the functionality of an application (e.g. what the software does) without peering into its internal structures or workings (Wikipedia).

I discovered a great feature in Vim today.

In this post, we’ll create a custom TLD for local development, and configure Apache to work with that.

When working with Internet protocols, we have to read RFCs a lot.

Spotify’s Web app is great, but you may prefer to use the desktop client.

The Urban Dictionary website is pretty useful when one wants to know the meaning of any familiar or slang word.