Search 🔍
63 articles on many different topics!
Tags: programming career java enterprise macosx linux opinions emacs kotlin rust books retro-computing gamecube cli low-level automation info youtube javascript lisp editor life-lessons devops gba ansible maven objectivism philosophy scheme prolog web-browsers dsl
Introduction to Ansible
Thu Mar 10 2022More automation! Ansible is a great tool to automate the configuration and handling of your computers. I have to admit I put off looking into Ansible for the longest time, simply because I underestimated how powerful it is! At the surface it seems like just another configuration management tool, but it is not just a way of running shell scripts like some may get you to believe. It comes with great tooling, and have great features that help you get going fast. In this article I will focus on the complete basics to get you started, and there will be features I won't cover here. Hopefully you will be aqainted with a few terms, and get some links that will help you explore these features further. Are you ready to learn the best automation tool for setting up computers?
Read more..Why and how to use Github Actions
Tue Mar 01 2022Automating repetitive tasks is great! My favorite tool these days for automating operations relating to code and development, is Github Actions. I even use it for this site! I have used Github Actions both for work and spare time for some time. Sadly the work stuff is proprietary (yes, organisations can be private on Github), so I have less examples to show here. Wonder why you should consider automating more? Or consider using Github Actions for your next project? Then continue reading!
Read more..Bit tricks - Absolute value without branching
Mon Feb 14 2022Bit trickery is always interesting! Sometimes you can use them to avoid branching (like if-checks), other times they are useful to save a few CPU cycles to avoid expensive operations. The absolute value trick I will show you here, is mostly to avoid branching. Why would you want to avoid branching? Many newer processors, from the mid 90s and onward, do something called pipelining to achieve a form of instruction level parallelism. While a classic processor fetch an instruction, decode it, then execute, a pipelined processor can fetch the next instruction while the previous one is decoded. You can have multiple operations like this almost in parallel. If we have to branch, like for an if-check, we might not have fetched the correct next instruction anymore, and might have to fetch new ones (for the whole pipeline). This can be an expensive operation. Calculating absolute values is a problem where we often have to have a branch (an if-check for smaller than 0).
Read more..More sci-fi books you should read!
Sat Feb 12 2022There is probably no secret that I love science fiction books and dream of the mysteries of space exploration. It's a nice way to fantasize about the future of technology, and to get your imagination going. Sometimes I get very inspired by these books, and it's also a great way to take a break from real life.
Read more..Should you read Designing Data-Intensive Applications? - A short book review
Mon Jan 17 2022You may have seen the book Designing Data-Intensive Applications mentioned several places, and wondered if you should read it. I have to admit I bought it years ago, and read parts of it (got side-tracked and researched graph databases further, and read something else). Last Christmas holiday I picked it up again, and this time I finished it. It covers many topics, ranging from how databases are designed, to how we can design good stream processing systems. Should you read it? Continue reading the review to find out!
Read more..
