Pejibaye Blog

LocalStack is a great product. It’s basically an emulator for the AWS cloud that you can run locally. We rely on it for development and automated testing. However, nothing comes for free. Understandably, the company behind this amazing piece of software has some bills to pay. They changed the license to require a subscription to run their provided Docker images. If the license is not provided as an environment variable, the image simply fails to start.

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I think a codebase can tell you a lot about the people that work on it. From this specific example in particular, I felt very reassured that the team takes work-life balance seriously and never works on weekends. For context, the software interfaces with old-school banking systems that famously do not run certain processes on holidays or weekends. We had some logic to to an early return to avoid running a process on bank holidays, imagine something like the following:

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SSH has a nice feature in which you can store aliases for frequently accessed hosts. Combining this with fzf, you can have a nice quick shortcut to quickly pick a server to connect to into. This comes in very handy if you need to ssh into different servers and forget their IP or hostname often. Here’s a sample ssh config file (normally located at ~/.ssh/config): # see https://man.openbsd.org/ssh_config.5 for all the available configuration settings Host runner-staging HostName 10.

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NodeJS has a neat API called AsyncLocalStorage. It’s used to share information across callbacks and promise chains. For example, it is useful to share information for all the code executed when serving a web request. I also found it very useful to keep trace information to easily keep track of which item was being processed during a batch process. The only caveat in my opinion, is that you need to wrap your code in yet another callback.

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This is a simple, straightforward implementation of a visualization reminiscent of the classic Windows 95 starfield screensaver. It is also interactive: you can touch the screen or use the accelerometer to influence the direction of the movement. This is how it works: Create a bunch of particles (100), each in a random position. Every frame, move each particle further away from the center*. The further the particle is from the center, the more visible it will become.

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