Project Alphaberry - Part 6 - The hard parts

Can you believe that yet another few months have passed? A lot of what I planned on working on in Part 5 has been working out really well, but in this post I will be discussing what went well, what isn’t going well, and where the project is at today.

Project Alphaberry - Part 5 - Checkpoint

So here we are, 4 months into Project Alphaberry. At this point, it is time to look back, reflect, and figure out what the next steps are. I have a running system, its pretty cool, and I learned a lot of things along the way, but now, we need to rebuild.

Build My Rig - 2017

So one of my internal hard drives failed last week, and I did the logical thing, and rebuilt most of my system. This post includes all of the parts to build out my current computer rig for 2017-2020?

GitLab - Omnibus Edition

In an attempt to look for a build/deployment pipeline at home, I came upon GitLab, a source control and continuous integration/deployment system. This really appealed to me because my entire home setup was meant to be controlled by automation. GitLab definitely fills a gap, but I ran into a lot of issues, and still have some that are plaguing me.

Docker Purge

There comes a time, when you just want to purge all the docker things from a machine. Over time, you can accumulate a bunch of garbage, and not even really realize it. While playing around at work and at home, I came up with this little script I use pretty often to clear out my working Docker environment on a system.

#!/bin/sh
containers=$(docker ps -a -q)
if [ ! -z "$containers" -a "$containers" != " " ]; then
  echo Stopping $containers
  docker stop $containers
  docker rm $containers
else
  echo No containers running
fi

images=$(docker images -a -q)
if [ ! -z "$images" -a "$images" != " " ]; then
  echo Removing Images $images
  docker rmi $images
else
  echo No images installed
fi

docker volume prune -f
docker network prune -f

This can be used on Linux, Bash for Windows, and even CGWyn. Basically, stop all containers, remove them, remove all images, prune all volumes, and prune all networks.

If you have any improvements to this, let me know down below in the comments!

Project Alphaberry - Part 4

It’s been a few weeks since my last update, and for anyone who follows me on Twitter you would have discovered that my progress is going, albeit slow. Life tends to get in the way of things, and getting through the learning curve of this project, without getting horribly sidetracked, has been a huge challenge, but, I knew this when I started, and I actually love every second of it! I know so much more about linux, networking, ansible, and docker at this point, then I though I could cram into just a few months at this.

Project Alphaberry - Part 3

There was a pause with the Project Alphaberry, I had to do tons of hardware/software planning. You see, I really want to get this right, and have it awesome, however, I am starting to hit that point of diminishing returns where planning and not doing is starting to get in the way.

As of today, enough talking, and on with the builds!

Migrating Old Website - Part 3

In this third part of the migration of my old website, I add even more functionality, as well as clean up some of the code.

One of the largest issues I had with the code overall was that it was pretty noisy. I decided that I would split out the Golang standard logging with the go-logging library. This is a pretty straight forward logger, at work we use a custom logger that integrates into our systems and provided line numbers and package/file names, but I didn’t feel that the extent of that system was neccessary in this, and go-logging is pretty powerful out of the box. The absolute key being, I could change the log verbosity overall of the output, since while doing the import, every action was pushed to the stdout.

Project Alphaberry - Part 2

Well, I started digging into the metal a bit this week. I now have a few linux machines laying around, and the starts of a real server infrastructure. Project Alphaberry continues…

Project Alphaberry - Part 1

As you have seen from recent posts, I am currently writing some software to pull down a lot of the content from my old website. At the same time, I am preparing the new hosting platform, as well as my own little playground, dubbed “Project Alphaberry”. In this first post, I want to talk about the “Alpha”.

Migrating Old Website - Part 2

In this second part of the migration of my old website. I take some time to add a lot of needed features to my importer application.

One of the first issues I noticed, is that the path is going to be troublesome for me to map if I don’t maintain the same file names, while the slug library that I found did a great job, I need to keep them consistent with the previous posts. I now modify the code to use the path from the post and use the net/url package to parse the link from the RSS, and then parse out the directory/filename.

Migrating Old Website

I have an ancient website that I pay a hosting company monthly for, and it isn’t cheap, due to never downgrading my plan. It currently runs on a Windows VM with a MS SQL server backend. Unfortunately, I haven’t modified this website in ages, due to the site just being… outdated. I want to migrate this off of the expensive site, and host it in either Github pages or a tiny host on Amazon EC2 to get my price down, and make it so I can start upgrading the site in place a bit more manageable.

Blogging with StackEdit

As mentioned in my last post, I am not happy with Live Writer anymore, and would prefer to use Markdown. However, Google Blogger (this blog engine) doesn’t support Markdown. Before rolling my own blogging pipeline, I did some minor googling, and found out that StackEdit supports publishing to Blogger!

Re-Evaluating Blogging Software

I have to admit, when I started this blog, I wanted to roll my own, but instead decided to just use Google Blogger. This hasn't been a horrible experience, but when doing code samples/snippets, I now find myself going into the HTML source and adding <pre> statements. I should also note that I am using the Open Live Writer (previously Windows Live Writer) to modify blog posts, with the exception of this one. And it takes... some massaging to work, basically, I write up the post, which is super tiny on my 4k laptop display, publish a draft, then go fix up the spacing (usually entering additional line breaks) to make it not look like garbage.

I think I might start looking at switching back again to a compiled github pages blog again, because writing markdown just feels so much more natural to me, rather than having to use a WYSIWYG editor these days, its trivial to get a mark down preview of your blog. Heck, I might even roll my own compilation chain with node or golang and open source it to compile the site.

Getting started with golang

You would think that as a polyglot, jumping into a new language would be pretty easy, and while Go’s syntax is pretty easy to get used to, this language actually had some hurdles to get used to in the development environment.

In this post I will talk about installing Go, setting up a project directory, and building a simple Hello World. While this doesn’t sound that complicated, you will be a bit surprised.