Learning Archives - Page 3 of 3

Building a Docker image for a Python Django application

After building a crypto index fund bot I wanted to host the application so the purchase routines would run automatically. In addition to this bot, there were a couple of other smaller applications I’ve been wanting to see if I could self-host (Monica, Storj, Duplicati). In addition to what I’ve already been doing with my Raspberry Pi, I wanted to see if I could host a couple small utilities/applications on it, and wanted to explore docker more. A perfect learning project! Open Source Docker Files As with any learning project, I find it incredibly helpful to clone a bunch of repos with working code into a ~/Projects/docker so I can easily ripgrep my way through them. https://github.com/schickling/dockerfiles/ Older, but simple Dockerfiles…

Using GitHub Actions With Python, Django, Pytest, and More

GitHub actions is a powerful tool. When GitHub was first released, it felt magical. Clean, simple, extensible, and adds so much value that it felt like you should be paying for it. GitHub actions feel similarly powerful and positively affected the package ecosystem of many languages. I finally had a chance to play around with it as part of building a crypto index fund bot. I wanted to setup a robust CI run which included linting, type checking, etc. Here’s what I learned: It’s not possible to test changes to GitHub actions locally. You can use the GH CLI locally to run them, but GH will use the latest version of the workflow that exists in your repo. The best workflow I found is working on a branch and then squashing the changes…

Lessons learned building with Django, Celery, and Pytest

As someone who writes ruby professionally, I recently learned python to build a bot which buys an index of crypto using binance. The best thing about ruby is Rails, so I wanted an excuse to try out Django and see how it compared. Adding multi-user mode to the crypto bot felt like a good enough excuse. My goal was to: Add a model for the user that persisted to a database Cron job to kick off a job for each user, preferably using a job management library Add some tests for primary application flows Docker-compose for the DB and app admin I’ll detail learnings around Docker in a separate post. In this post, I walk through my raw notes as I dug into the django + python ecosystem further…

Blocking Ads & Monitoring External Drives with Raspberry Pi

I’ve written about how I setup my raspberry pi to host time machine backups. I took my pi a bit further and set it up as a local DNS server to block ad tracking systems and, as part of my digital minimalism kick/obsession, to block distracting websites network-wide on a schedule. Pi-hole: block ads and trackers on your network Pi-hole is a neat project: it hosts a local DNS server on your Pi which automatically pulls in a blacklist of domains used by advertisers. The interesting side effect is you can control the blacklist programmatically, enabling you to block distracting websites on a schedule. This is perfect for my digital minimalism toolkit. Pi-hole has an active Discourse forum…

Building a Elixir & Phoenix Application

Learning Elixir Ever since I ran into Elixir/Phoenix through a couple of popular Hacker News posts I’ve been interested in tinkering with the language. I have a little idea for an app that I’m just motivated enough to build that Elixir would work for. I’ve document my learning process below by logging my thoughts as I learned Elixir via a ‘learning project’. What I’m building Here’s what I’d like to build: Web app which detects the user’s location using the built-in location service in the browser The zip code of that location is determined (server or client-side) The zip code is handed off to a server-side process which renders a page with the zip code…

Using Ansible to Deploy Elixir Applications on Dokku

For me, the best (and most fun!) way to learn is to find a problem with a new set of tools you want to learn. I’ve documented my process of learning Ansible below, I hope it’s interesting to others! Motivation I built an application with Elixir and Phoenix and deployed it using Gigalixir. Gigalixir worked well, but after a couple of weeks the site shut down due to a lack of updates (I was on the free tier). Since this project is strictly for learning, I figured it would be fun to learn Ansible and save a couple bucks by signing up for a free VPS service. I initially chose Vultr because they offered $50 of free credit towards a $3.50/month VPS, which should be more than enough for a year…

Running Tests Against Multiple Ruby Versions Using CircleCI

I’ve been a long-term maintainer of the NetSuite ruby gem. Part of maintaining any library is automated tests against multiple versions of various dependencies. Most of the time, this is limited to the language version, but can include other dependencies as well. Recently my build config stopped working as CircleCI upgraded to V2 of their infrastructure. I found it challenging to find an example CircleCI V2 config with the following characteristics: No Gemfile.lock and therefore no caching of gems. When you are testing across ruby versions you can’t use a single Gemfile.lock. No rails, no databases, just plain ruby Here’s an heavily documented CircleCI config that tests multiple ruby versions:

Time Machine Backups with a Raspberry Pi and External Drives

As I was reviewing my backup strategy, I realized I hadn’t completed a Time Machine backup on my machines in a long time. Plugging in the drive was just enough friction to forget doing it completely. The Airport Express has a USB port to plug hard drives, printers, etc into. These devices would be magically broadcasted to the network. It was awesome, and then Apple killed the device. The Eero I upgraded to is great, but the USB port is useless. But, there’s silver lining! I’ve been looking for a good excuse to buy a Raspberry Pi and mounting external hard drives on the network fit the bill! $35 for a tiny computer more powerful that anything I had growing up and more powerful than a $5 DigitalOcean or AWS VPS. What’s not to like?..

Category: Learning