happiness
Virtue seems like a dusty old concept which fits in an 18th century - but not in our modern digital age. I disagree! I believe the problem with virtues is not the concept as such but the particular virtues we have long aspired to. Virtues, however, are a key pillar
happiness
I have long been an avid follower of the positive psychology movement. Be it justified or not, I am a bit skeptical about psychology as a discipline in general since I got the impression that a lot of established facts and practices in psychology are based on poorly executed studies.
linux
With the release of Java 10 only a few days ago, it seems only prudent to update to Java 10 on suitable systems since the support for Java 9 official ends with the release of Java 10. (Note that Java 8 still enjoys long-time support, so it might be the
AWS Elastic Beanstalk is well established service of the AWS cloud and can be used as a powerful platform to deploy applications in various languages. In this short tutorial, I will outline how to conveniently deploy a Tomcat application to AWS Elastic Beanstalk using the beanstalk-maven-plugin. The following assumes that
open-source
I've always had a soft spot for diagrams. I think that representing information in various visual ways tremendously helps our thinking and understanding. Unfortunately it is often a big headache to create (and maintain) diagrams. So I was very pleased today when I came across PlantUML. PlantUML is
grafana
I recently wrote an article showing how to configure Prometheus and Grafana for easy metrics collection. In that article, I assumed that the system which should be monitored would use the systemd approach for defining services. I now had to set up the node_exporter utility on a system which
devops
I love VPS providers such as RamNode or ServerCheap which provide excellent performance at a low price point. Unfortunately, when going with most VPS providers, there are no easy built-in facilities for backing up and restoring the data of your servers (such as with AWS EC2 snapshots). Thankfully, there is
devops
On first glance, logging looks like an exceedingly simple problem to solve. However, it is one of these problems which unfortunately become more and more complex the longer one looks at it. I think because of this, there are many frameworks in Java to support logging (since everyone seems to
devops
As mentioned in my previous post, I have long been looking for a centralised solution for collecting logs and monitoring metrics. I think my search was unsuccessful since I was looking for too many things in one solution. Instead I found now two separate solutions, one for log management (using
devops
I have been looking around for an easy to use and reasonable priced solution for managing logs distributed among many servers and system metrics for these servers. I had a brief look into setting up an ELK system but I found that looked quite cumbersome. Recently I came across Graylog
git
Some time ago, I have written an article about how to set up versioning for WordPress using git. I now came across an article by Newt Labs which have created an infographic about the justification for using git for WordPress. I think this infographic is quite insightful, so I will
maven
I cannot count the times I have looked up the following through Google. Thus I decided to put together a few handy parameters (or properties or whatever is the correct term) for Maven builds. All the below are given with the goal install but they can safely be used with
