The Magpie
Posted on April 14, 2018
| 12 minutes
| 2434 words
| Riaan Hanekom
Note: I split this post into two to make it more digestible. For background and context, see my post Shiny things.
TL; DR; Background and definition The Magpie is misunderstood and provides a good model for learning The V model of learning (contrasted to the model of T-shaped people) attempts to maximise intersection points in knowledge to enable fast learning It’s vital to build a solid core to enable the transfer of skills from one domain to another Haphazard learning achieves little - intentional learning is key Practice learning, unlearning, and connecting ideas.
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Shiny things
Posted on March 27, 2018
| 7 minutes
| 1386 words
| Riaan Hanekom
Rabbit holes I disappear from time to time. No, not in the physical sense. Rabbit holes are everywhere. I follow them and emerge a couple of days (or weeks) later, hopefully wiser.
For illustration, I wandered through Docker land for a whole 6 months. That particular rabbit hole went deep. The weird and wonderful container landscape is still maturing and changing fast. Below the surface of a seemingly simple virtualisation technology lies a myriad of tools, concepts and philosophies.
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Setting up Jekyll - navigation with a modern site-map (and R.I.P)
Posted on March 18, 2018
| 6 minutes
| 1125 words
| Riaan Hanekom
Preface In previous posts in this series I’ve used categories rather than tags. I have now switched these around because naming matters. If you need to do this, a quick sed execution will do the trick:
sed -i 's/categories:/tags:/g' *.md Having changed the variable of tags we also need to change the include for displaying tags to replace categories with tags.
Autopages The jekyll-paginate-v2 gem has built-in support for generating pages based on the tags and categories in posts.
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Setting up HTTPS with Let's Encrypt
Posted on March 5, 2018
| 6 minutes
| 1181 words
| Riaan Hanekom
Chrome 68, due in July 2018, will mark all non-HTTPS sites as insecure. Instead of buying a certificate it seemed like an apt opportunity to use Let’s Encrypt, a free and automated Certificate Authority. It’s easy enough to get started with Certbot supporting most platforms.
Getting started By far the easiest way of getting started is if you have access to the web content directory. Certbot will generate a file in a well known path and handle the handshaking process between Let’s Encrypt and the website to verify the websites identity.
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Setting up Jekyll - related posts and series
Posted on March 1, 2018
| 3 minutes
| 567 words
| Riaan Hanekom
By default, the related_posts feature of Jekyll returns the newest 10 posts rather than related posts. This is to speed up generation of the site by not using it’s Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) capabilities implemented by classifier-reborn since that takes quite a while to run.
To use LSI, you need to add the --lsi flag. Out of the box, it takes an incredibly long time to run. On my tiny blog, it took over an hour to complete the build process with LSI included.
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Setting up Jekyll - prettier paging and categories
Posted on February 28, 2018
| 3 minutes
| 562 words
| Riaan Hanekom
Following up from the previous post on setting up Jekyll, we take out our tools and customize it some more. When reading any of my posts you should realise I’m after utility rather than beauty. That said, we’ll try to pretty things up to an acceptable level as we go along.
Prettier paging The next/previous paging is functional, but rather ugly. The jekyll-pagination-v2 gem has exactly what we need with support for pagination trails.
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Converting HTML blog posts to Markdown
Posted on February 25, 2018
| 4 minutes
| 679 words
| Riaan Hanekom
I am reviving quite a few things - this blog as well as some open source projects. They desperately need some TLC…
Since this blog has travelled through various hosting options and technologies I still had quite a few legacy posts formatted in HTML. I’ve taken the plunge to refactor them into much cleaner Markdown syntax.
It was easier than expected. With a couple of good libraries to lean on I wrote a quick Node application to do the dirty work.
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Setting up Jekyll - the basics
Posted on February 22, 2018
| 6 minutes
| 1113 words
| Riaan Hanekom
Introduction Since Octopress has now been deprecated for pure use of Jekyll, this blog has now been switched to use exactly that. See this post as a walkthrough on creating a functional blog via Jekyll (part 1). This is yet another collation of snippets I have found useful, to be used as a reference for my future self - and maybe others.
Starting off You can find the installation instructions for Jekyll in the official documentation.
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Using Sonar Cloud on .NET Core with Travis
Posted on January 21, 2018
| 2 minutes
| 241 words
| Riaan Hanekom
Note to self since I just spent a frustratingly long time on this. In order to analyse your .NET Core project with Sonar on Linux (using Travis in my case since it’s an open source project), the following is required:
Have a machine with Mono and .NET Core installed Download the MSBuild Sonar Analyzer and ensure that the scripts are executable Execute it perfectly with just the right amount of parameters For reference, some build steps out of a Travis YAML file I’ve been working for NGenerics:
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Still alive
Posted on December 25, 2016
| 1 minutes
| 126 words
| Riaan Hanekom
I’m still alive. And so will this blog be once again.
It’s an interesting feeling to notice that your last post dates back to 4 years (4 YEARS!) ago.
I’ve done the migration from Octopress to vanilla Jekyll now and in the spirit of doing the smallest thing possible, this is the MVP.
Since my last post I have made the leap to Software Development Manager, and then to General Manager - Technology and Development at DStv Digital Media.
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