During Little Godzilla’s term 3 school holidays back in October 2024, he joined a 2-day camp where the kids learnt “coding”. I later figured out they they learnt to program an Edison using EdScratch.
He wasn’t initially enthusiastic about this coding camp because he wanted to do an animation camp instead but the schedule didn’t work out for us. So I didn’t have much expectation.
However, when I picked him up at the end of the second day, he proudly showed me his bot: Dave!
After eons of SVN and CVS (anybody remember those?), I have been managing hundreds of Git repositories, mostly on GitHub. Out of those repositories, plenty are on Enterprise and Team accounts, but most are on Free accounts. The latter there is a bit of a pain to manage as it doesn’t have the ability to natively sync secrets across repositories.
This means that if I want to update a secret, I have to do it manually on each repository. Multiply this to hundreds of repositories, and it becomes way too tedious for any human to tolerate. So I ended up automating it using Terraform.
First post since 2018!
This long hiatus has been unplanned since the last blog post. This is the result of raising a young child, combined with busier-than-ever work, topped off with COVID-19. It was challenging to say the least, the toughest part being having to work on tough projects from home while assisting remote preschooler classes in parallel. Nevertheless… we made it through in one piece.
There’s one good news though. A few months before the pandemic hit and Victoria went into lockdowns, we moved to a new place which provided more space for Little Godzilla to run around and this house has an extra room that him and I have been sharing as a work and study space.
Wayyy back in May 2018, I presented a talk at Adobe Experience Cloud Meetup - 5th Edition titled AEM OpenCloud.
AEM OpenCloud is an open source cloud platform for running Adobe Experience Manager environments on Amazon Web Services. This provides the bells and whistles in terms of auto recovery, failover, blue green deployment, repository migration, back up management, content health checking, multi AEM versions support, multi operating systems support, multi architectures and permissions support, and a lot of other features.
Milestone: At 30 months old, my son figured out that there’s a future in running an underground robot fighting club.
Back in June 2018 (I should really really really work on my blogging), I presented a talk at Adobe Immerse ‘18 titled Beyond AEM Curl Commands. This is basically the culmination of my effort in tackling the widespread (mis)use of cURL commands for provisioning Adobe Experience Manager environments, and the lack of official AEM web API.
This event was promoted as “The global virtual conference for enterprise developers on Adobe solutions & platform,” and it was my first time giving a talk at a virtual conference. Learnt some lessons with managing event preparation on different timezones (would somebody please think about Australia? :p), and to also get a clear voice recording (my session producer blamed the Internet from down under, but I blamed the mic).
Back in November 2017 (I should really work on my blogging), I presented a talk titled How To Play Music On A Vacuum Cleaner at ANZ Technology Unconference 2017. I gave the audience a walkthrough of my experience with trying to fix a broken circle-dancing Roomba which ended up with utilising the Roomba vacuum cleaner as a music player, some sound tuning tips included!
It was a nicely run (un)conference, specially in its inaugural year. Kudos to the organising team, I really enjoyed the sessions, specially the Q&A panels.
I hastily wrote Feedpaper in 2011 (was called FeedTouch back then) as an effort to come up with the fastest way for me to speed-read the news from a curated list of websites. Imagine going to the good old brick and mortar book shop and skimmed your favourite newspapers as fast as possible.
Lo and behold, it is still up and running in 2017, and it still is the fastest way for me to consume the news. The only difference is that Feedpaper is now running on this tech stack: App.js, node-read, ae86, Terraform, and S3.
I was in San Francisco this week for Jenkins World 2017 where I also gave a talk titled Bringing Jenkins Remote Access API To The Masses.
Took this opportunity to have few chats in person to a number of people whom I had previously only known from Jenkins/Hudson IRC channel and mailing list. It was also interesting to talk to other Jenkins users with varying use cases and requirements.
The conference itself was great. To me, it cemented Jenkins position as the incumbent in CI/CD space (I’m happy to hear if anyone would like to convince me otherwise).