https://bgottlob.com/ Recent content on Brandon Gottlob Hugo -- gohugo.io en-us Mon, 10 Apr 2023 20:58:12 -0400 https://bgottlob.com/post/2023-04-10-initializing-cloud-platform/ Mon, 10 Apr 2023 20:58:12 -0400 https://bgottlob.com/post/2023-04-10-initializing-cloud-platform/ Over the past few months, I have been building a small scale Kubernetes platform to host open source software for personal usage and hobby projects. The main goals for this infrastructure include: Enough reliability for light, daily usage Enough durability of persistent data to stop depending on proprietary cloud storage systems like Dropbox An easy way to scale up compute resources in modest increments Management through infrastructure as code Built (mostly) with open source software This blog post explains these requirements further along with the few lines of Terraform used to initialize the platform. https://bgottlob.com/post/2019-05-29-nix-use-cases/ Wed, 29 May 2019 07:28:21 -0400 https://bgottlob.com/post/2019-05-29-nix-use-cases/ Nix is a “purely functional” package manager aimed at creating reliable, reproducible build environments. It is an incredibly powerful tool, but it’s difficult to understand the benefits of its academically pure approach and the wide range of problems it can solve without having some experience using it. Its user manual is comprehensive and well-written, but very dense. I started using Nix a few months ago and only understand a small fraction of its functionality, but it turns out even that is enough to solve many common issues I face building development environments. https://bgottlob.com/post/2018-10-14-first-impressions-exercism/ Thu, 18 Oct 2018 07:28:21 -0400 https://bgottlob.com/post/2018-10-14-first-impressions-exercism/ Over the past two months, Exercism has proven to be a great tool for sharpening my Erlang skills. It provides an accessible, low-overhead way to learn the standard build tools and best practices of a language, which is lacking from other online programming practice platforms focused solely on interview preparation. Exercism has some limits, since the exercises are the same for every language, but feedback from mentors with deep knowledge of specific languages is invaluable.