In my last post, I said I was in Italy on vacation and you may be thinking to yourself (most likely not, but just go with it) “what high tech gizmos did he bring with him on his travels?” and I would happily reply “A book!”, yes a paper book. Being a software developer, I have access to tons of technology, more so when it comes to paper book replacements but there is just something about a real book that makes reading and learning for me better than using a computer, tablet, or doohickey.

As I sit here in Venice on my vacation, I figure this would be a great time to dust off my blog. I haven’t put much time into it lately, I find myself wanting to write when I have a good balance with work and life with some learning on the side. Sadly, this balance has been missing for a bit, which leads us into a bit of a back story, the details are not important but the overall experiences that I gained are.

I have lived through a lot of the major WiFi technology updates, I have also replaced a lot of WiFi routers in my lifetime. With wanting to spend less time dealing with WiFi issues I decided to buy something that was a better quality. Around 2013 the Apple Airport Extreme 6th generation just came out and had some of the best technology for the time, it received many updates, and over all worked well.

GPG stands for GNU Privacy Guard, it’s a public-key cryptography that can be used to digitally sign items like commits in Git. GPG provides a lot more functionality, but let’s go into why you would want to digitally sign your Git commits. Git does not have any way to validate the author of a commit. When setting up a Git client on your system you are able to use any email address you desire.

Obviously, Fitbit is an activity tracker, there isn’t any doubt about that but there are some nice features with Fitbit’s line (along with others) of activity trackers that have been extremely useful in the DevOps and Infrastructure area of my current job. I have the Fitbit Charge 2 and for an activity tracker it does everything I would want and it is perfect for what I need, even though I’m not as active as I want to be.

Over the past couple months, I’ve been working on fine tuning my Python skills, part of this has been taking tutorials online along with building some applications. One of the things I’ve been wanting to document, mostly for myself, is setting up a new environment for developing with Python. I’m using macOS Sierra right now, it seems that most operating systems still comes with version 2.x of Python. It’s always a good idea to be able to control the version of Python you are using.

So, it was time for a bit of change for the blog. I have been using an older version of Jekyll for some time and upgrading for me has always been a pain. I picked to move away from Jekyll to something new, this is where Hugo comes into play. Hugo Hugo is another static site generator like Jekyll but written in Go, it boasts itself as the fastest tool of its kind but it wasn’t the speed that drew me to it.

I’ve had the opportunity to use the Elastic Stack (formally known as ELK) for some time now, there’s a great number of use cases that the Elastic Stack can fit, but one of the primary uses is to help aggregate logs files into one centralized location. This gives you the ability to analyze and research your log files, at work we’ve been able to gain a lot more insight into our services using the Elastic Stack.

I said in my last posting that I could do better with cutting down the build time. To get everything working I needed to add a lot of tasks to the BitBucket pipeline. Besides the execution time, BitBucket also needed to download the Docker Image every time, so the Docker Image size is also a factor in the overall build time. Let’s look at some things we can do to make a better Docker image to cut down the build time for the blog.

Atlassian just took their Bitbucket Pipelines out of Beta a bit ago, so I wanted to take look and get something up and running on it. From a quick look, it reminds me a lot of Codeship, which is a great service I have used to publish this blog along with using it at my previous job. For a nice test, I wanted to see if I could replace Codeship with Bitbucket Pipelines for my blog.