Tech Lead Digest – Q3/4 2021
It’s time for the 5th instalment of my tech lead digest posts. I switched to monthly for 2 months, but decided to back down to quarterlyish. You can find the other digests by checking out the series. 🧑🤝🧑Wikidata & Wikibase The biggest event of note in the past months was WikidataCon 2021 which took place…
WordPress plugins
Back in 2018 I wrote a post listing the WordPress plugins that I use on this blog. That post only received 122 views, but it was specifically written for some folks I know that are running WordPress blogs. Another friend (you know who you are) recently told me they were thinking of starting a blog,…
Dispatching custom event in Fitbit SDK
I just upgraded my Fitbit charge 2 from 2016, to a Fitbit sense from 2020. After getting everything set up I took a quick look at the developer documentation and found myself in a web based IDE called Fitbit studio and before I knew it I had sideloaded a development demo app onto my new…
Reflection on filling a new Wikidata item
A few days ago I watched a Twitch stream by Molly / GorillaWarfare where they created the Louis W. Roberts English Wikipedia page. I decided to follow along and populate the matching Wikidata item (Q109662645) with as much information as I could from the same references that were being found for the Wikipedia article. Along…
mediawiki-docker-dev in mwcli
The original mediawiki-docker-dev environment was created by accident and without much design back in 2017. In 2020 I started working on a new branch with some intentional design and quite liked the direction. And now finally, the all of the mediawiki-docker-dev functionality exists in a new home, with more intentional design, tests, stability, releases and…
mwcli CI in Wikimedia GitLab (docker in docker)
mwcli is a golang CLI tool that I have been working on over the past year to replace the mediawiki-docker-dev development environment that I accidently created a few years back (among other things). I didn’t start the CLI, but I did this mediawiki-docker-dev like functionality. As some point through the development journey it became clear…
addwiki php libraries 3.0.0
Back in 2014 I wrote a small collection of PHP libraries, releasing 2.0.0 of the base library in 2015 for interacting with MediaWiki and Wikibase. My goal back then was to create a stable base that PHP bot frameworks could be built on, while also experimenting with some framework like features in surrounding libraries. And…
Developing on Windows, the WSL life
The Windows developer experience has evolved quite allot in the last 5-10 years. I now spend most of my development life running Windows with WSL2 and using Windows Terminal and winget. So here are a few pointers from my experiences so far. WSL (WSL2) WSL2 is what you want! The first version of WSL was…
Delete all Github releases, using the Github cli
If you are like me, at some point while developing projects on Github you will have started and stopped using releases, opting to switch back to only creating tags. Github defaults leave you in a bit of an awkward position here where the “Releases” section in the side bar will continue to show your old…
Using skaffold.dev with helmfile deployments on minikube
Recently I setup a small skaffold.dev development environment for a platform deployed using helmfile, deployed to a GKE cluster in production that is moving towards also having a local setup using minikube. There is an open Github issue requesting helmfile support, so my first fear was that this wouldn’t be possible. Though after a little…