Posted on February 17, 2017
Enable jessie-backports, if not already enabled on your system. As described here:
echo deb http://ftp.debian.org/debian jessie-backports main | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/backports.list > /dev/null aptitude update
Install certbot as described here:
sudo aptitude install certbot -t jessie-backports
Configure a web server, so certbot can communicate with the outside world. I use lighttpd.
Continue reading `Configuring CouchDB 1.6.1 with LetsEncrypt free SSL certificate on Debian 8 (jessie)` →
Filed under:
Linux
Posted on January 30, 2017
Today I reached a meaningless milestone.
My most popular post on StackOverflow, the leading Q&A site for programmers, earned its 500th vote*.
The post is short, and pretty hilariously insignificant. The question asks how to repeat a simple search-and-replace operation. My answer was essentially to add a single character, the letter “g”, to their code.
Continue reading `Remembering significant minutiae` →
Filed under:
Programming
recruitment
stackoverflow
Posted on October 27, 2016
Debian ships with an old version of Docker, and the official installation instructions for Docker on Debian are a bit dubious (run an entirely untrusted shell script as root! yay!), not to mention error-prone, and result in a completely non-functional Docker installation on Debian, thanks to aufs being deprecated. So these instructions should make it possible to install Docker 1.
Continue reading `Installing Docker 1.12 in Debian 9 (stretch)` →
Filed under:
debian
docker
Linux
Posted on October 21, 2016
After a few weeks of not hacking one of my hobby projects, I decided to get back to it today, only to discover that the SSL certificate guarding it had expired. Being just a hobby project, it wasn’t important, but it was annoying.
But before I went to buy another $9.
Continue reading `Praise for Let's Encrypt -- Free, automated SSL certificates` →
Filed under:
Linux
security
servers
ssl
Posted on October 20, 2016
It’s been just over a month now, since my last day as an employee of Booking.com. Which means it’s been just over a month now since I wrote my last line of professional Perl. This is worth celebrating!
Now don’t get me wrong. It’s not that I hate Perl. In fact, I’ve really enjoyed using Perl over the years.
Continue reading `warn "Use of Perl has been deprecated.\n";` →
Filed under:
Go
javascript
node.js
Perl
Programming
Work
Posted on October 20, 2016
Atom’s tab-completion drives me nuts.
I’ve always found auto-complete to be an insanity-inducing feature in my programming text editor. Inevitably, it causes me to type the wrong thing, or hit TAB too many times. Enter-complete I find to be even more infuriating.
But auto-complete, especially in text editors designed for programmers, is often very a elaborate feature.
Continue reading `Question to fellow programmers: Do you like auto-complete?` →
Filed under:
best-practices
Programming
text-editors
Posted on October 19, 2016
go-spew is a very handy library used for dumping arbitrarily complex data structures in a (roughly) human-readable format.
This is immensely helpful when debugging or writing automated tests in programs. Coupled with a package like go-difflib, it can make comparing the expected and actual results of a test not only easy, but into something approaching fun.
Continue reading `How I got go-spew to work with GopherJS` →
Filed under:
Go
gopherjs
Programming
Posted on October 14, 2016
I’m working on a new mini-project.
It’s in large part inspired by… well, many things.
Motivation The most immediate inspiration comes from Patrick McKenzie’s blog, which I just finished reading in its entirety earlier this week while I was in Paris (well, I skipped a few posts that didn’t matter to me).
Continue reading `My new project: MinimalPairs.net` →
Filed under:
business
language learning
Languages
Programming
Posted on October 13, 2016
On Monday I had my first brush with what I guess might be called “fame.”
I attended the dotGo 2016 conference in Paris–a conference for Go developers.
I chose my seat in the balcony of the Théâtre de Paris, and within a few minutes the seats next to me filled in, and I began chatting.
Continue reading `Almost Famous` →
Filed under:
conference
fame
Go
golang
Programming
Posted on August 11, 2016
A couple of weeks ago I made a comment to my team at work which I think a couple took harshly, but I believe it is true, and an indication of a deeper problem.
I said “All of the really smart people at this company move to the ‘infrastructure’ teams within a few years, which means we have only new, untrained people writing the real software.
Continue reading `Where are the domain experts?` →
Filed under:
Programming
Work