Category: Programming

A big part of my work has to do with code. I’ve worked as system administrator – installing, patching, and configuring someone else’s code. I’ve worked as independent programmer, writing code on my own. I also programmed as part of the team. And on top of that, I worked as Team Leader and Project Manager, where I had to interact a lot with programmers. Programming world on its own is as huge as the universe. There is always something to learn. When I find something worthy or something that I understand enough to write about, I share it in this category.

Markdeep – Markdown on steroids

Markdown is of the best formats for writing documentation. It’s intuitive, cross-platform, and can be read or written without any special tools. But it does have a variety of limitations too (no includes, no special formatting for advanced things like charts or formulas, etc).

Markdeep is one of the tools that tries to extend Markdown and solve some of its limitations.

Markdeep is a technology for writing plain text documents that will look good in any web browser, whether local or remote. It supports diagrams, calendars, equations, and other features as extensions of Markdown syntax.

GitGuardian API Security Best Practices

The team behind GitGuardian, a tool that helps developers to keep credentials and other secrets outside of the source code, shares their documentation for the API security best practices.

The cool bit about their documentation is that it covers both how to avoid the issues and how to solve them if they happened.

On the future of Docker, containers, and serverless

I came across this blog post – “Goodbye Docker and Thanks for all the Fish” – which talks about the not-so-eminent, but very predictable death of Docker as both the technology, and the company. The gist of it is that container orchestration kicked in, and made Docker very replaceable with alternative container solutions. So much so, that in the upcoming release of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 Docker has been replaced by Podman and a few other tools.

While I don’t know enough to have a strong opinion on the subject, the logic expressed in the blog post kind of makes sense to me.

All that reminded me of the recent interview with Simon Wardley, with the title providing the oversimplified summary:

Containers won the battle, but will lose the war to serverless.

Serverless concepts have been getting a lot of hype recently as well. And while I like where it’s going, I don’t think serverless will become a reality any time soon. Sure, it’s very applicable to smaller and simpler applications and well-engineered environments. But I think it’s more of a dream for the medium and large enterprise sector.

The thing is that the world moves at a much slower pace than we, in technology, would like to think. This Forbes article quotes some numbers from the study by IDG that shows that even the cloud adoption in the enterprise is far from complete yet.

The benefits of the cloud computing are obvious, but it takes time, and often a lot of it, to adopt the new technology and rip those benefits.

Once the cloud dust settles a bit, containers are the next on the list. I don’t have any hard numbers for container adoption in the enterprise, but my gut feeling is telling me that they are way below the cloud numbers (have a look at this study to get the feeling).

Serverless, in my mind, is the step after the containers. So even if that’s the future, it will take a long long time to get there.

Or maybe it won’t. Sometimes, the world gets so far behind the technology curve, that it jumps ahead by skipping steps. An example of that would be telephony in China, which went from almost nothing directly to mobile telephony, practically skipping the landlines.

Using the NetworkManager’s DNSMasq plugin

Fedora Magazine runs a handy article for anyone using work/corporate VPNs from a home computer – “Using the NetworkManager’s DNSMasq plugin“. This is also not the only use for the DNSMasq plugin. It comes in useful when you work local cluster setups for development or testing. Furthermore, pretty much any setup where you need to route DNS queries to different servers, this can either be used out of the box, or provide good ideas as to how to solve the problem.