• Building and testing on multiple platforms – introducing minicoin

  While working with large-scale (thousands of hosts), distributed (globally) systems, one of my favourite, albeit somewhat gruesome, metaphors was that of “servers as cattle” vs “servers as pets”. Pet-servers are those we groom manually, we keep them alive, and we give them nice names by which to remember and call (ie ssh into) them. However, once you are dealing with hundreds of machines, manually managing their configuration is no longer an option. And once you have thousands of machines, something will break all the time, and you need to be able to provision new machines quickly, and automatically, without having to manually follow a list of complicated instructions.

  When working with such systems, we use configuration management systems such as CFEngine, Chef, Puppet, or Ansible, to automate the provisioning and configuration of machines. When working in the cloud, the entire machine definition becomes “infrastructure as code”. With these tools, servers become cattle which – so the rather unvegetarian idea – is simply “taken behind the barn and shot” when it doesn’t behave like it should. We can simply bring a new machine, or an entire environment, up by running the code that defines it. We can use the same code to bring production, development, and testing environments up, and we can look at the code to see exactly what the differences between those environments are. The tooling in this space is fairly complex, but even so there is little focus on developers writing native code targeting multiple platforms.

  For us as developers, the machine we write our code on is most likely a pet. Our primary workstation dying is the stuff for nightmares, and setting up a new machine will probably keep us busy for many days. But this amount of love and care is perhaps not required for those machines that we only need for checking whether our code builds and runs correctly. We don’t need our test machines to be around for a long time, and we want to know exactly how they are set up so that we can compare things. Applying the concepts from cloud computing and systems engineering to this problem lead me (back) to Vagrant, which is a popular tool to manage virtual machines locally and to share development environments.

• GNU Gengetopt - News: 2.23 released

  New version (2.23) was released. Main changes were in build system, so please report any issues you notice.

• Abolishing SyntaxError: invalid syntax ...

  Do you remember when you first started programming (possibly with Python) and encountered an error message that completely baffled you? For some reason, perhaps because you were required to complete a formal course or because you were naturally persistent, you didn't let such messages discourage you entirely and you persevered. And now, whenever you see such cryptic error messages, you can almost immediately decipher them and figure out what causes them and fix the problem.

• Sending email with EZGmail and Python

• Creating and Importing Modules in Python

• Additional properties in .editorconfig

  For some inexplicable reasons vim-editorconfig stopped working with my latest build of neovim. I am not sure why and I haven’t have enough time to debug it properly. As a workaround I have temporarily (?) switched to editorconfig-vim. The former plugin is all written in VimL, so it was not problem to extend properties it supports by two more ones spell_enabled and spell_language corresponding to spell and spelllang vim options respectively. The later plugin is in Python and it is a bit more complicated, but fortunately it has an explicit hook for custom plugins.

• Big O Notation and Algorithm Analysis with Python Examples

• Factorial function using Python's reduce function

• Serverless and Knative: Installation through Deployment

  Serverless, Knative and FaaS will change your workflow as much as any change to design patterns in your career.

  In this video, Red Hat’s Kamesh Sampath will deep dive all about Knative.

• Using Terraform and cloud-init on Hetzner

• Glibc Gets Patched For Three Year Old Security Vulnerability

  CVE-2016-10739 has been around since April 2016 as implied by the number and finally today this security issue has been fixed in the Git development code for the upcoming Glibc 2.29 GNU C Library.

• Fedora 30 Going Through Its Formalities To Ship With & Built By The GCC 9 Compiler

Linux system administrators are in high demand these days and many hiring managers say they're having a hard time finding talent to fill their open positions. It's critical, then, for companies seeking skilled admins to hone their recruiting process in order to stay competitive – and this starts with writing an effective job posting.

Unfortunately, many companies aren't hitting the mark. Job postings for sysadmin positions are largely similar; they’re boring and generic, according to New York City-based recruiter Steve Levy.

If you’ve followed any tech news aggregator in the past week, you’ve probably seen the story about how SourceForge is taking over admin accounts for existing projects and injecting adware in installers for packages like GIMP. For anyone not following the story, SourceForge has a long history of adware laden installers, but they used to be opt-in. It appears that the process is now mandatory for many projects.

People have been wary of SourceForge ever since they added a feature to allow projects to opt-in to adware bundling, but you could at least claim that projects are doing it by choice. But now that SourceForge is clearly being malicious, they’ve wiped out all of the user trust that was built up over sixteen years of operating. No clueful person is going to ever download something from SourceForge again. If search engines start penalizing SourceForge for distributing adware, they won’t even get traffic from people who haven’t seen this story, wiping out basically all of their value.