Currently writing this post in beautiful Port Alberni, BC, a city known for… stuff, probably. And this old dog who came to see me asking for scratches. I took a few days off from work to spend time with my partner before she goes on a road trip. While work hasn’t been particularly stressful, it’s nice to take some time to recharge.

I ain’t doing all that (manually)

Speaking of work, it still feels a little surreal to be in charge of the backend side of things, in an environment where I can pretty much do whatever I want, as long as it makes sense. I think they call that “trust” and “autonomy” in other places. In that spirit, I’m taking that position very seriously as I’m setting up the foundations: writing tests, keeping documentation up to date and making sure that contributing to the project is as easy as possible.

We’re using a self hosted GitLab to put all of our code, which means that we also have to maintain our own fleet of runners to build and release new versions of our services. I’ve been experimenting with different server configurations to see which one would yield the most satisfying results but setting up a server and registering a new runner is kind of an annoying process. I originally started automating this using bash scripts and the Digital Ocean developer API until I remembered the existence of Terraform. Not the bullshit promise you may have read from our favourite billionaire who wants to live on Mars, mind you. I’m talking about the tool from Hashicorp that allows you to describe your infrastructure as code. I’m not gonna go into details right now, because I’m still learning but after half a day spent reading the documentation and using the official providers from GitLab and Digital Ocean, in a matter of seconds I can:

1. Create a new GitLab Runner
2. Create a new droplet on Digital Ocean
3. Provision that droplet with docker, gitlab runner, etc.

From there I can run a few builds, see how it goes, tweak the configuration if I want to and tear down the whole thing once I’m done experimenting (so that we don’t spend 500$ on a server that I forgot to turn off). I’m really happy with this setup because it uses standard tools and more importantly, Terraform had been on my list of technologies to learn for a while now.

I ain’t reading all that

One of my favourite memes of all time is the one conversation where the person says “I ain’t reading all that; I’m happy for you though; or sorry that happened”. I’ve been using it a lot at work when people write large blobs of text. I do end up reading all that, but it’s just too funny to pass on an opportunity to use it. I’ve also adapted it a few times to replace “reading” with “watching” when someone shared a video, for example. As a result, I decided to make a little tool to generate my own version of this image and it’s available here.

The main reason behind this project (besides having fun) was to play with technologies that recently became exciting to me again: HTML, CSS and Javascript. No frameworks¹, nothing fancy, just good old client side technologies that are so fun to work with as a “mostly backend” guy. The whole thing allows you to edit the word “reading” to put whatever you want instead, you can select a theme and use your own profile image… I definitely took it further than I originally planned, but I’m very happy with the result and I’m looking forward to being annoying at work with it. I also have some ideas for the future, mostly adding better themes instead of just copying mostly consistent colours from Pastel.

I ain’t running all that

On Sunday 4th I ran my 3rd BMO half-marathon (my 4th overall) and it went… ok. I think my head wasn’t completely in the game this time, for a couple of reasons: I already mentioned the shin splints issues in a previous week update, but on top of that I’ve had very busy weeks so it was hard to make room for training, I caught COVID so I lost some time, etc.. The annoying part is that when I started running, I told myself “fuck, I really enjoy running long distances”, so I don’t think I’ll be quitting anytime soon, but I’ll try to find ways to make it fun again (by running different races, for example).

I still really enjoyed running with my friends on Saturday morning, re-learning to run faster and more efficiently during those Tuesday Track nights… As a result, I didn’t do too bad because I ran those 21.1km in exactly the same time as last year: 2:18, despite feeling much worse than last year. After looking at my pace accross the race, it looks like I got overexcited at the beginning and started the race a little too eager, which made me hit the wall earlier than expected.

Some cool links

• This blog post really helped me come up with something simple to add themes to my stupid-but-fun little project. I do love a clear blog post about achieving something.
• I finally took the time to read the interview of Linus Torvald by GitHub about Git turning 20. I’m only sharing it here because it was amazing to read how much Linus didn’t seem like he wanted to be here? 😄 I much prefered the blog post by Scott Chacon which led me to a few videos I want to watch soon.
• I really like this Paper Book Lamp, those would make truly awesome gifts.

I’m currently spending a few days on Vancouver Island and wrote this blog post on the porch of a very rustic cabin, while listening to birds and drinking terrible instant coffee. This is great (except the coffee.)