I was talking to a co-worker recently about my use of docker instead of virtual environments (venv) and he mentioned that I should probably write something up about it. It didn’t occur to me that this might be a more preferred method than venv until I had this discussion. It makes sense to briefly explain venv and then how I use docker instead. What Are Virtual Environments (venv)? I think this is a great place to start. If you’ve ever used Python, you’ve probably seen some mention of virtual environment (venv). I won’t go too crazy on explaining them and how to use them. In short, venv allows you to create a Python environment that is self contained to help you not clutter up your machine with various libraries. Worse yet, if you need to run multiple versions of the same library, you can have issues running everything in one environment. For the real details, I suggest you check out the Python documentation on venv. ...

If you’ve looked at my LinkedIn profile, then you already know that I currently work for a start up called Cyral. With that already being a known thing, I figured it wouldn’t hurt to add some Cyral specific things to the blog as well. This first post is specific to Cyral but could help others that are trying to integrate Jira Cloud with other APIs that require a Java Web Token (JWT) to authenticate. ...

In Tinkering With Artificial Intelligence Blog Writing, I talked about tinkering with some various AI engines. Google has just come out with their AI Chatbot, Bard. As you can see from the blog post, Bard has been out for awhile but was only open to internal use. Google recently started providing invites to the public to use Bard. Yesterday, I received my invite to use Bard! My very first thought was to try and use Bard to generate a blog post. While the other AI products I used had specific blog writing tools, Bard is more like ChatGPT. Bard is a chatbot so it was easier to generate my content. ...

What can I say, upkeep sucks. I had made a number of changes as I migrated this blog from one platform to another. After the migrations, I even made some changes to WordPress. After making all of those changes, everything was broken but it didn’t matter. I had lots of leftover static content that allowed the broken links to function or so I thought. After making my blog searchable, I had a friend of mine reach out, David, reached out to let me know that I had some broken links. I didn’t think too much of it until I realized what all was broken. ...

After I was able to Deploy a Nanobus Web Server, I thought about using Nanbous to replace Nginx. I’ve moved on a little from Deploying Nginx + PHP + git-sync on Kubernetes. I still run Nginx + git-sync on Kubernetes. I’ve removed the need for PHP in my Nginx web servers anymore. I thought, do I still really need to run a full blown Nginx anymore on some of my static servers? Let’s find out! ...