ResticOne of the greatest discoveries I’ve made after switching to the Linux galaxy is, without any doubt, the fantastic Restic; a backup tool that deserves to be better known and more widely used.
Hugo in DevOps ModeAs I explained last week I have been updating this website in various ways; I removed the downloadable PDFs, then added privacy-friendly analytics, and finally, I set up a scheduled pipeline in GitLab to automatically build and deploy this website every Friday morning.
Yup, Still Learning a New Programming Language Every YearI gave an update on this lifetime activity of mine in 2006, 2007, 2011, and 2013, and here we go for 2023.
What Objective-C 3.0 Could Have BeenIn a parallel universe, in a parallel WWDC 2014, instead of Swift, developers got Objective-C 3.0, and this is what it would have looked like. It’s the same parallel universe where Russia doesn’t annex Crimea, by the way.
Containers and DLL HellBack in the 1990s, shared libraries were all the rage. Instead of having to ship a 20 MB *.exe file to your customer in various floppy disks, you could cut some code out, put it in a set of *.dll files, and reuse that code across all your products. Every vendor would then install lots of DLL files in your system, and they would be reused by other apps from the same vendor.
Killer AppsThe D programming language lacked a “killer app” to break through. Another brilliant language suffered from this situation, objectively deserving a much better fate than the one it had; Smalltalk.
D, or What Go May Have BeenIn my quest to learn more and more programming languages, I recently dipped my toes into the D Programming Language. My reaction to it involves sadness; on the positive side of things, the language is undeniably brilliant.
Reusing Apps Between Teams and Environments Through ContainersThis was my speech for the WeAreDevelopers Container Day on February 3rd, 2021. The talk will feature a live demo showing how to build, optimize, and distribute containers to be reused in as many environments as possible, 100% based on the experience of the VSHN team.
Fortune AppsAs part of my work in VSHN, I lately prepared a set of demo applications ready to be containerized and deployed in our new product APPUiO Cloud.
A Linker for JoelIn January 2004 Joel Spolsky wrote a blog post titled “Please Sir May I Have a Linker?, where he described his tribulations trying to install a small .NET app in computers not bundled with the original .NET framework.
Polyglot ConwayMy personal project during the pandemic was Conway, a project providing implementations of Conway’s Game of Life in as many programming languages as possible.
Kubernetes for Non Technical ReadersIf you work in the tech field, the word “Kubernetes” is all over the place these days; for those new to the subject, it can be very confusing to understand what it is, what it does, and why it is so important to so many people.
Still Learning One Language per YearQuick update about my “one language per year” lifelong initiative:
Learning One New Language Every YearHere’s an update of the current status of my “one language per year” lifelong initiative:
Thoughts about Google's Go Programming LanguageHistorically, we can distinguish really big software companies for providing, at least, four major kinds of products: an operating system (sometimes open sourced at a certain level), a web browser (with various degrees of standard compliance), a suite of office applications (slightly compatible with everyone else’s), and a programming language with curly brackets (generally incompatible with everything else).