Peter Forret
because eloquence is, like, whatever
Peter Forretbecause eloquence is, like, whatever
TL;DR: I have started using mkdox (which uses mkdocs, material and Docker) to create a static documentation site for every repository/project I’m working on. It’s easy, light and fast. It also invites me to document everything in Markdown, which is great for coding agents.
If I wouldn’t be able to control myself, I would create a new website every week. Creating a website about … any topic really, helps me structure the knowledge I have or am in the process of collecting about it. The tools to create a new website have changed through the years. There was my Blogger period, my WordPress period, my Jekyll period. And now I am in my Mkdocs period.
GitHub Actions, used in countless CI/CD setups, are a good example of the ubiquity of bash scripting. Most of the run: lines in an Action YML document are nothing but (a sequence of) bash command lines.
When writing bash scripts, one needs to find ways to do things that aren’t built in to bash.
String manipulation like lowercase conversion, parsing, removing whitespace…
all use tools/binaries built-in to the OS, but not in the language itself.
I’m talking about tools like cut, awk, tr, sed, sort, …
A technique commonly used practice in (deployment of) software projects is to put your local configuration, environment variables and secrets in a .env file in the root of your project. This .env file is structured as a one-dimensional lookup table (a list of key=value lines), and saved only on that server, never checked in to the project code.
This is the start of a series on some bash tricks and features that I’ve developed for the bashew bash scripting micro-framework.
I’ve been migrating more and more of my websites to Jekyll static sites, from WordPress. The advantages are clear:
version management with git suits me (it’s how I develop software).
deployment/hosting with GitHub Pages is very easy and can be automated
the security of having a static site (i.e. no visitor/hacker can change it) is a relief
sure, WordPress has plugins and comments, but that has become more of a burden than a feature for me.
After reading all the raving reviews online about the new Apple M1-based Mac computers, and after losing too much time with my overheating MacBook Pro 2013 that’s on its last legs, I caved and bought a Mac Mini M1.
See this photo below? It was created with one, albeit rather long, command line:
When you’re creating software packages that will be used by other people, you need to get your versioning in order. For PHP libraries, this means: both the version number in composer.json as well as the git tag for Github/Bitbucket. For node.js projects, the version is kept by npm in package.json. It was always too easy to make small mistakes. So I decided to make a bash script <strong>semver.sh</strong> to manage it for me.
(Use this link to get 6 months of free hosting on Gandi!).
I recently took the habit of using more Emoji characters in blog posts and titles, because why not 🤷♀️. In order to look up the most appropriate Emoji, I was always checking out the official Unicode Emoji list. Unfortunately, that list is HUGE and loads very slow 🐌. So I made a tool to 🔍 look up Emojis easily!
I like to automate. I like it so much that I will not hesitate to spend 8+ hours on writing a script that replaces 5 minutes of work every month. Most of my automation is for CLI (command line interfaces). On Windows, that means CMD, but for most other platforms (Linux, MacOS, Busybox) the best tool for it is bash or shell. I've created my own self-contained bash boilerplate script (a good scripting starting point, with a lot of regularly recurring functionality already built in.) But I still needed to git clone the repository, or copy/paste from the github page,...
