In my neverending quest for the perfect development set-up, I’ve recently tried a couple of improvements for my hitherto standard command line tooling (ZSH + iTerm2). While ZSH has—for me—stood the test of time (and I don’t feel the need to try out another shell yet), there is, in my opinion, always room for improvement on the terminal emulator side. So, here’s a quick guide on how to use my new weapon of choice, Alacritty.

Brave is a free, open-source, Chromium-based web browser that has a strong focus on privacy. Brave also has the option to run progressive web apps (PWA) as standalone applications. This may be useful if you prefer to run some apps in the browser, but still want to have the benefit of launching and switching to the app like a fully native app. Some websites unfortunately don’t declare themselves properly as progressive web applications or simply are not PWA-enabled yet. Brave has the nice feature that in spite of this, you can install websites like these as a PWA. The workflow to do this is a bit hidden in plain sight, however, so here’s a quick tutorial on how to do it.

The Kubernetes API is changing all the time. With these changes come deprecations and eventual removals of parts of the API. To be able to keep an up-to-date Kubernetes cluster version, we have to identify deprecated APIs and update them. This may become tedious in larger clusters with hundreds of resources but tools like pluto can help.

Today we’re looking into the potential future of JavaScript by reading up on the types as comments proposal that seeks to introduce type information as part of the core JavaScript language.

Prowler is a security auditing tool for AWS that helps us catch security defects such as credentials stored in plain text or S3 buckets that are publically accessible by accident. While Prowler is generally a very useful technology it sometimes also reports false positives. Thankfully, Prowler also comes with a whitelisting functionality that allows us to ignore certain resources.

Helm is a great tool for defining and deploying Kubernetes-native application packages. If we deploy to multiple environments, we typically have to write multiple values.yaml files containing duplicate values. Keeping our values files DRY is possible, however, either natively via multiple value files options or, using YQ.

GitLab CI/CD has a powerful but somewhat under-documented pre-build script feature that allows us to execute custom logic before builds are run on a GitLab runner. This post explores how to utilize the pre-build script to automate Docker system clean-up on GitLab runners.