Blog.

For about as long as I’ve worked in tech, ‘local development’ has mostly meant one of two things: The Developer Laptop: install a bunch of stuff until everything works.

A long time I ago I found myself in a fighter jet in Dutch airspace.

I’m not big on New Year’s Resolutions.

Debt — most people are familiar with it; most people also don’t like talking about it.

The past few years, whenever my birthday would be coming up, I would inevitably end up reflecting on things a little.

Automatic updates.

Today I found myself in a bit of a discussion.

Don’t use the same password twice.

If you own a recent GoPro camera (Hero 7/8/9+) you can use it as a webcam on your computer without any additional hardware.

Over the past few years, Kubernetes has grown from something that ‘seemed very interesting, but also very complex’ to something that you can get as a service from pretty much everyone.

This is the second post in this series.

Anyone who works on code and is part of a team is probably familiar with Pair Programming.

I’ve spent the better part of the past decade designing, building, and running platforms.

For well over a month now, many companies have been transitioning to a mandatory fully-remote organization.

I vividly recall Steve Jobs sitting down on a leather arm chair, on stage, and introducing what was the very first iPad.

Over the past weeks, a large part of the world was affected by COVID-19, also known as ‘the Coronavirus’.

In a previous blog I explained how to have different Git identities (e.g. work and private) with different settings, and making that work automatically.

Benny helps companies navigate cloud complexity and ship better software, faster.

Last week Terraform 0.12 finally came out, and it’s huge.

About a year ago, I (finally) started learning Go.

A while back I shared some of my favorite Git tricks.

Pretty much everything I do is code.

How many people have you helped today?

Today I came across a (new?)

As you may know, I store my shell configuration in git, so I can easily share the same shell config across multiple machines.

Git is everywhere nowadays, and I use Git pretty much daily.

I’m lucky enough to own a top-of-the-line 15" MacBook Pro which has more than enough horsepower for whatever I need to do, and even my ‘old’ machine, a 2014 15" MacBook Pro, would still be perfectly good for whatever I need to do.

A bit over a decade ago, I went from Amateur Infrastructure Tinkerer to Professional Infrastructure Engineer.

I have been using Terraform in production since version 0.4.0, and most of that experience has been pretty awesome.

Old-school purists will tell you to just follow Rule #5 (Harden the f**k up), and that the all-time greats like Merckx and De Vlaeminck didn’t need ‘a computer on their stems’ to ride fast.

Recently, Docker announced a new and exciting product: Docker for Mac.

I love cycling.

Perhaps slightly inspired by this blog by Jessica Frazelle I started putting some of the apps that I like to run on my Mac inside a container.

I have been using Terraform in production since version 0.4.0, and most of that experience has been pretty awesome.

If you are a bit like me, you happen to run a few things in a terminal.

So far, most of my blogposts have been about technology or my work as a consultant.

What is Otto?

Over a decade ago, I traded my bag-of-hurt dualboot setup with Windows XP and Linux for something ‘better’.

Many development and ops teams rely on chat for communications.

If you’re a frequent reader of my blog, or if you happen to know me personally, you know I work as a consultant on fully automated IT infrastructure.

(or at least, part of it…) In a previous blogpost I mentioned that I use Git to manage my ‘dotfiles’.

I’d like you to meet vm123.shared.dc1.bc.int.

I work as a consultant for a company called Xebia, and have worked as a consultant for most of my career so far.

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a little about switching editors and my plan to use Vim for all my editing tasks for (at least) a few weeks.

Have you ever tried writing using your ‘weak’ hand?

In the previous parts of this series I have discussed various aspects of complex Puppet setups, how to make sense of the huge amounts of code, and how to set up the basics for your development environment.

In the previous part of this series of blogs I showed how, and why, complex Puppet setups come into existence, and some general guidelines to keep yourself from getting lost.

A few days ago vulnerability CVE-2014-9390 was announced.

Usually, installing games on your work computer is frowned upon.

The downside to ‘Puppetizing’ everything is that you usually end up with huge amounts of code.