Latest Posts

From Jekyll to Hugo

Jun 19, 2019

I have decided to switch the site over to Hugo from Jekyll. In the process, I also switched from using Travis CI to GitHub Actions. I’ll cover the CI switch in a follow-on post. In this post, I’ll cover the motivations and what I did to switch.

Jekyll served me quite well for quite some time but there are a few factors that motivated the switch:

1. Ruby toolchain updates This isn’t really Jekyll’s fault. I just don’t really do much Ruby development any longer and, since it’s pretty obvious that I don’t post here often, I typically find myself wanting/needing to do chores such as updating dependencies and chasing down any issues. Though, typically there haven’t been many. I will note that, while I have been doing more Go development, Hugo is distributed as a binary and really the only Go you need to know about relates to templating (unless you want to contribute).
2. Batteries included As evidenced in my Adding Disqus to Jekyll post, Jekyll takes an approach where you should install plugins and assemble things yourself. I see some advantages to that for customization and leaving out dependencies that you don’t need. However, this site isn’t really all that complicated and I just want things like Disqus, pagination, etc… to work.

Open Sourcing Dockerfile Image Update

Apr 8, 2018

My colleague Andrey Falko recently published a post on the Salesforce engineering blog about a tool we built and open sourced called Dockerfile Image Update. It’s a pretty nice way of pushing pull requests to child Docker images when a parent image has changed while avoiding using the latest tag by plugging it into your CI/CD flow. Check it out!

Setting Jenkins Node Monitor Thresholds with Groovy

Mar 24, 2017

Today I ran across a case where we were trying to programmatically set the threshold for when Jenkins will automatically turn off a Jenkins agent (found under https://$YOUR_JENKINS_HOST/computer/configure). The default is 1GB and we’d like to bump that up a bit. We’re periodically wiping out any nodes that are offline (as well as the resources behind that node) so doing this will clean them out sooner.

Free SSL Certificates

Jan 26, 2016

I got an e-mail today from Amazon informing me that they have released the AWS Certificate Manager and that they would make it easy to get certificates added to your AWS resources. And, best of all, it is free.

I had originally intended on using Let’s Encrypt for my SSL certificates but I had read about some issues with automation and limitations on what you could do. I’m not sure if they’ve resolved those as of yet but they may have.

Adding Disqus to Jekyll Site

Dec 19, 2015

As I mentioned in my Hello Jekyll! post, I’m administering this site with Jekyll. I’ve got all of my code in GitHub and am using Travis CI for continuous integration / continuous delivery of the site. That’s been working quite well thus far, though I’d like to add more testing utilities.

One thing that was missing once I moved my blog from Blogger to Jekyll was a commenting system. I’ve seen Disqus used quite frequently and it seemed like a nice way to get a commenting system introduced without adding annoyances to users (or for me) since it allows people to use Disqus credentials or credentials from various other providers (e.g. Facebook).