Latest blog posts

A few months ago, I received my Steam Deck, the super powerful portable Linux gaming device made by Valve, the company behind Steam, and capable of playing Windows games without Windows. Taken by my irresistible desire to tinker with it, I noticed that it uses a read-only root and OverlayFS to guarantee the best experience for all the users. This is so Smart! So I have decided to do something similar on my Raspberry Pi running my NAS to test upgrades before actually upgrading.

A few months ago, I became the Lead Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) in Visma e-conomic. This new position is allowing me to work with brilliant people! In our industry, brilliant colleagues often have a hard time collaborating, and communication is very hard. In this post, I want to talk about the start of our journey from an Operational (Ops) team to embracing SRE using kindness and compassion as a way: Trust and forgiveness.

This blog post is about what I have changed in my blog and website to make it faster. Recently, I have traveled with a bad airplane company that delayed my luggage. In the hope of getting my belongings back with me, I tried to use their website and support pages, and I was frustrated every time. The primary source of frustration was the website speed. So I decided to spend most of the time without my luggage (around five days), trying to use best practices to improve my website and blog, making my Hugo blog faster and way lighter than before.

During the dark side of quarantine, I had to keep my hands busy, and instead of writing on this blog (sorry!) I started streaming on Twitch instead. To add some interactivity with my viewers, I made my own bot to let my viewers create and display custom Images and GIFs with text… Basically, a Meme Generator! This is the story of designing it, building it in Go, and running it Heroku 🤩

If you are using Orion, Siderus’ IPFS desktop client, you might have noticed that the app has not received any update during the last year.

Around a year ago, after noticing an extensive amount of misusage of our IPFS Gateway to share illegal content, I have decided to redirect the traffic to the official IPFS Gateway. We took down the servers and IPFS nodes and gateways from every continent.

I recently decided to replace my k8s home cluster with a Hashicorp Nomad cluster on my 3 Raspberry Pis. When I was using it, I found myself writing a significant amount of HCL files, and I have been missing Helm’s simplicity.

As an SRE, I have been working with Kubernetes for a while now. During this time, I had to install, configure, and distribute some apps using Helm. For me, it is a de-facto standard when it comes to deploy and maintain apps that otherwise would require a way bigger list of YAML files. Can we do the same for Nomad Jobs’s definitions?

I have the feeling that a blog post about distributing packages is needed. 😮 In a word filled with Containers, PaaS, and SaaS, it seems weird to talk about how we can automate the creation of Debian packages and APT repositories. Nonetheless, even if this appears to be a forgotten step for operations, some projects are not distributed over Debian packages, 👷‍♂️ and I need them for my Raspberry Pi! 😜

All static websites meet a hard limit when a comment form, “like” buttons, or any interactive content is required. These extra components force people to build an API, host a server, a database or pay for any SaaS product that does that… we could write a blog post about that, but it would be too easy! 🤣 Instead in this article, I wanted to challenge myself a little more and explore how to make a decentralized like button: We will try how it is to not be hosting any server or database, and instead use a p2p networks and a decentralized database to count the likes. 👍

During the last year, I have been curious about Immutable Infrastructure. After researching, I noticed that I had been applying some of these concepts already to stateless Docker containers, and I wanted to do a practical project with it. So I thought about exploring Immutable Infrastructure and use it to deploy Hashicorp Vault.

The journey that I have decided to take with Siderus brought myself always in embarrassing moment on meetings Hyped discussion about “Blockchain” and data storage. In this article I don’t want to talk about the misconceptions about storing data into a blockchain, but instead I want to focus on a more generic question that I have been asked: Is a blockchain useful for human being? Can we use it for good?