Posts

So I combined a few solutions I found online to come up with a quick way to set up maintenance mode using nginx. Ideally it shouldn’t happen but in times of emergency in can be good to knock up a quick maintenance page for everyone but your own internal ips. Nginx Config So here’s the configuration I use for nginx, it starts with setting the internal ips of your company in the main nginx config file. Then in the actual vhost, you can set it to watch for the existence of a maintenance_on.html and when it exists, throw a 503 and use the maintenance page as your 503 error page. ...

So Microsoft has been in talks with Github about a potential acquisition. There are several reasons why this is a terrible idea. Github is a pretty solid git repo hosting company, but it has a few core values that are in jeopardy here and I’m not sure Microsoft(or anyone) can acquire an entity like Github without severe repercussions. Platform agnostic integrations Github has a ton of super useful integrations that help make the life for developers a lot easier. Tools like appveyor, travis-ci, coverall, readthedocs, codacy are really useful and what’s so great is you free to run them wherever you like. How can Microsoft make the business case to keep platform agnostic integrations that are aiding competitors? Maybe they won’t ban them, but they may become very much second class citizens. ...

For the last few months, I’ve been working off a varying series of to-do lists to drive my life. I use a mix of the Things app, my bullet journal, and a calendar. Basically, my setup is to have annual Smart Goals, broken down into achievable chunks, then broken down into tasks to knock off todo lists. On the face of it, it’s a way to organise a wiggly world. ...

Wild Wild Country – The Soundtrack For anyone who hasn’t seen Netflix’s Wild Wild Country, I highly recommend you watch it. The story told, along with the wealth of footage they got their hands on makes it an incredible watch. The soundtrack is also excellent, I’ve put together the soundtrack as a playlist on Apple Music, you can find it here. Enjoy!

I’m happy to see the media dog-piling on Facebook so much lately. None of this ’news’ seems to actually be conveying much that’s new, more that it’s started taking what was slowly becoming normalised and framed it in a way to highlight the outrage. I don’t particularly like the media’s approach but I can’t feel too sorry about Facebook. We should be outraged with their on-going behaviour. Four years ago I wrote an article about de-activating Facebook, I have not used Facebook since then and I believe I’ve permanently deleted my account somewhere along the way. I didn’t remove Facebook for it’s data hoovering and sharing but simply for it’s lack of intrinsic value. There have been points over the years where I felt a little FOMO, but very rarely and never enough to get back onto the site. Perhaps I don’t know what I’m missing, but from the looks of it on the outside that hasn’t been the case. ...

While I was camping along the West Coast of the US, I heard about the Leave No Trace movement and found the idea very much resonated with me. Recently, I’ve found myself looking around day to day and wondering where I could start leaving less of a trace. We can all hate on consumerism, but lets face it, well all need to consume a certain amount to live in the modern world. So this isn’t a guide on becoming a burlap wearing hermit, it’s just a few things I’ve come up with for to start applying this idea into my life a little more. ...

I’ve been meditating now for 150 days straight, but even before that I was a fairly regular meditator for many years, I had just never kept up with any sort of meaningful streak every single day. My current momentum started from a difficult period in my life and even once that difficulty subsided, there was still a desire to keep going with the streak. 150 days later and I’m still happy to maintain it, but figured I’d write down a few insights I’ve gotten from this whole period. ...

For the past few years as a freelancer, I’ve done many forms of remote work. I’ve worked both part and full-time remote positions, I’ve also worked with teams across multiple time-zones, in locations ranging from home offices, hotdesking, even camping and crummy motels, so I have a fairly broad range of experience with remote working. It seems to be the trend that many companies have opted for, and this is definitely a great idea, both for the employee and the company. The employee can often cultivate a better work-life balance and the company can access a far wider range of talent than what may exist in the local area. ...

Recently I wrote about why I’m using an iPad Pro as my main “at home” machine and how I’m generally using it for tinkering around with remote servers. There is however, one caveat. I do still have an at-home server that I use for helping with making the iPad as feature rich as I need it to be. The Server To do this, I essentially have Archlinux running on an old Thinkpad X230, sitting under my router connected via an ethernet cable to keep things nice and stable. The only way I manage it is over SSH. ...

So recently I wrote a post on why a developer might use an iPad Pro as an at home machine. Today, I’m going to elaborate on how I’m actually using it day to day. So there is not much you can do locally Realistically, as a local dev environment there really is not much an iPad Pro can do. I’m used to proper Linux/Unix based machines, these sandboxed apps just didn’t cut it for me, there’s nothing close to a full development system on an iPad(sorry I know!), I wouldn’t even bother trying. So pretty quickly I opted to go for a remote Linux box that I could remotely access. ...