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
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
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
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
programming
Today I came across a nasty error which occurred in a deployed Java application only but not during development or integration tests. The error went something like the following: java.lang.NoSuchMethodError: java.nio.ByteBuffer.rewind()Ljava/nio/ByteBuffer; at nx.serializerkryo.internal.InternalKryoSerialzer.performToStream(InternalKryoSerialzer.java:33) at nx.
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
I find that developer documentation is often not very pleasant to look at and, more importantly, often very difficult to navigate. I worked briefly with the PayPal REST API and, while I found that at times it can be confusing to deal with the numerous APIs PayPal offers, aesthetically their
jenkins
Since I plan to set up a continuous integration server in the near future, I had a quick look around for open source and cloud-based solutions; my main concern was finding something which will work for a small scale project and result in reasonable costs. Jenkins (Open Source) The best
devops
I set up a Jenkins server on a brand new Centos 7 VPS. In the following the instructions for doing this in case you are looking at doing the same: Setting up Jenkins Server * Install OpenJDK Java sudo yum install java-1.8.0-openjdk * Add Jenkins Repo and install Jenkins sudo