It’s January 2018 and while I’m gathering my notes for the year’s first post its’ good to look back what I wrote in 2017 and make plans for the new year. In 2017 I managed to write as leisurely as usual and put together 17 articles of which 6 are something other than monthly notes. On average I wrote 1.4 post per month. I visited some meetups, did software development and tested technology stuff. Business as usual and I presume that it’s going to continue this way also this year.
Monthly notes
Writing Monthly notes series about interesting articles I’ve come across has proved to be good way to ensure that I keep reading what happens in software development and also think about it. Collecting articles to monthly post have worked better than publishing weekly. In July I was mostly mountain biking and away from the computer so there was no Monthly notes.
Meetups
Meetup scene in Helsinki has grown and there are several interesting events you can attend almost monthly. But that said, it’s also starting to get growded and events with good topics tend to fill up quickly. I usually find myself going to events to hear war stories of Amazon Web Services, Docker, DevOps, Frontend and Mobile. It’s useful to hear how other’s do things and get new ideas. Meetups and conferences are also nice way to both freshen your thinking and get to know people working in the same field.
In Nebula Tech Thursday – Beer & DevOps we heard stories about “Cloud Analytics – Providing Insight on Application Health and Performance” and “Building a Full Devops Pipeline with Open Source Tools”. OWASP Helsinki chapter meeting #31 presented topics like “DevSec – Developers are the key to security”, “Docker Security” and “Leaking credentials – a security malpractice more common than expected”. Both events where nice and as usual Nebula Tech Thursday with great food and drinks. If you follow me on Twitter you might have noticed that I went to more meetups than I wrote about, like Solita Core and Slush.D.
Software development as usual
Microservices and Docker has evolved the way we do things and to Dockerize all the things you can run Ansible inside Docker container. You might ask why and that’s easy to answer: isolating all of the required dependencies from the host machine and to get the Ansible version we want.
For making software development more reliable I introduced git pre-commit and pre-receive hooks for validating YAML to our continuous integration process. Validating YAML can be done by using a yamllint and hooking it to pre-commit or pre-receive helps you to automate the check for syntax validity, for weirdnesses like key repetition and cosmetic problems such as lines length, trailing spaces and indentation.
Other things
As an engineer I’m interested of technology and gadgets and sometimes I get things to test. In July I wrote about keeping data secured with iStorage datAshur Personal2 USB flash drive. It is an USB flash drive with combination of hardware encryption, physical keypad and tamper-proofing. Small external devices are easy to lose and can leave your data vulnerable if not encrypted. The hardware encrypted USB flash drive seemed to be quite crafty.
Awesome times ahead
New year, old me. Or something like that. Plans are to continue as before, write about technology, collect interesting articles, learn new things about software development and of course ride mountain bike. The training for the Enduro racing season has already started.
So, stay tuned by subscribing to the RSS feed or follow me on Twitter. Check also my other blog in Finnish.
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