Articles

A dark factory is a factory that runs without people on the floor: the lights can stay off, because nobody needs to see. The software version of that idea is a system where an issue goes in and a reviewed pull request comes out, and eventually a deploy to production, without a developer typing the code.

Ten years of Home Assistant, why it's my favorite software and what my setup looks like.

Four lessons learned from building an AI analyst feature into Metric Moose: use libraries, test automatically, store conversations and mind privacy.

Structure your Kubernetes configuration with Kustomize: a folder layout that separates shared cluster services from project deployments.

Visualizing the important business KPIs in one dashboard by using an open standard and open source software

Load testing gives insight into a web application's behavior under peak load conditions and realistic load conditions. By load testing your web application you will identify the maximum capacity the web application can handle as well as any bottlenecks and determine which element is causing degradation.

When you're ready to launch your website or web application, you can use this checklist to be fully prepared for the Go-Live and have a smooth transition!

Autoscaling is an important feature of Kubernetes. With this feature, you always have enough resources for the workload, and when a node becomes unhealthy it gets replaced without affecting the workload. But you won't get it automatically by just deploying your Pods on Kubernetes.

If you need to access services that are only reachable from the Kubernetes cluster or for example debug some network/DNS issues then you don't want to attach to a running pod which is part of production deployment.

When using the MySQL docker image you can easily create a DB dump with this one-line CLI command.

If you want to switch things like lights with your Raspberry Pi, you need a relay board. A relay is an electronic switch that can be switched with a low-voltage signal. Exactly what the Raspberry Pi offers as GPIO pins. The relay board I've found is ideal for the Raspberry Pi.

This CLI one-liner searches for .css files with @import statements and adds a 'cache busting' query string to it. You can use it to make sure the browser picks up the new CSS files when they are included with @import statements.

There’s a backwards compatibility break in PHP 5.5.13 (and PHP 5.4.29) affecting PHPUnit, Mockery, Doctrine, Symfony and probably a lot more.

Speed up WordPress on a small VPS by configuring Nginx to cache PHP-FPM responses for up to a week, with smart exceptions for logged-in users.

Varnish provides some tools to help you monitor and debug Varnish' health. One of those tools is varnishncsa. When you run it without arguments it shows a real-time access log in the Apache combined log format. That's nice and can come in handy. But, it really gets interesting when you define your own format like this:

I came up with the idea to import my bank transactions into ElasticSearch to see if I can get some nice statistics out of it with Kibana.