ANDREFFS

GoTo Conferences!!!1!

andreffs18@gmail.com (André Silva) — Thu, 13 Jun 2024 17:29:18 +0100

I really enjoy conferences. I think it’s one of the best things the tech industry has!

Covid stopped us from going to “in-person” conferences, and we all had to shift to a more “remote” or “online” version of it. You still got to see some great talks, but there’s a world of difference between how you experience and learn from them.

This year I’ve finally got back to an “in-person” conference, and being so excited about attending one again I started making a list of what I should do to make the most out of it.

Tools vs Data Structures

andreffs18@gmail.com (André Silva) — Thu, 16 Feb 2023 07:27:00 +0000

Usually, when interviewing for an engineering or software position, you end up doing some sort of “coding challenge”. A friend of mine has recently left the company and is doing one at the moment. He asked me for help on solving a particular challenge, which I felt was a good exercise for me.

This blog post talks a bit about the challenge and my approach to solving it. Also, this post works as a personal reminder that sometimes it is not about picking the best tool, but the right data structure.

n8n customizations for Production

andreffs18@gmail.com (André Silva) — Mon, 17 May 2021 16:58:27 +0100

This post is a continuation on “Setup n8n on Kubernetes”, so most of the things we talk here assume that you’ve followed/read this one as well.

After running n8n during a couple of months in production, me and my team realized that the default configuration do not work very well for us.

So here in this post I go over the changes we did to allow n8n to scale and work without problems.

Observability on n8n

andreffs18@gmail.com (André Silva) — Thu, 29 Apr 2021 23:52:17 +0100

This post is a continuation on “Setup n8n on Kubernetes”, so most of the things we talk here assume that you’ve followed/read this one as well.

You have your own n8n instance running in Kubernetes, taking advantage of all amazing functionality and capabilities of it, but you are still going in blind right now. I mean, how can you check if your service is healthy? Is it running? How much memory is it using? 🤔

Setup n8n on Kubernetes

andreffs18@gmail.com (André Silva) — Mon, 05 Apr 2021 21:16:27 +0100

Update 2021-05-23: Decided to split this post into 3 different ones to be more easily read. You can find the other two here: “Observability on n8n” and “n8n customizations for Production”.

So at my company we started using n8n to setup some MVP’s, build workflows and glue together some of our internal tools in order to automate some of our processes.

In this post I’m going to go over how we’ve deployed n8n on our Kubernetes Cluster.

Debug in Hugo

andreffs18@gmail.com (André Silva) — Mon, 25 May 2020 06:37:00 +0000

While building this website I needed to understand a bit more about the internals and its variables. Even though Hugo’s documentation about debugging is pretty “okay”, there are a lot of attributes that are really hard to figure out, specially if you can’t see them on the documentation.

So I started to look online for something to help me out debugging Hugo templates and the usual 3 options were:

🖨 printing the dot on Hugo’s templates
📝 console.log the whole dot variable
✅ using Hugo debug themes

Printing “the dot”

In any hugo template, if you do this:

How I've Scanned 5K MTG Cards

andreffs18@gmail.com (André Silva) — Thu, 14 May 2020 23:12:18 +0000

Update 2022-08-16: Same thing as last year. Also, I finally managed to sell the whole collection. Need to pay for that dinner now :)

Update 2021-05-24: Went back to this to refresh with 2021 prices and check if those change that much after a year. Well, it seems it does 😂

A good friend of mine gave me an old box of magic cards, like a really big old box, and during the first couple of weeks of COVID, I decided to sort them out to see how much money I had in there.

Just keep on "Save for later"

andreffs18@gmail.com (André Silva) — Mon, 30 Mar 2020 10:50:00 +0000

Since this #remotelife began, sadly not for the best reasons, I’ve been able to finally clean my backlog of, guess what, TV Shows, Games, Podcasts, Books… Well, everything that a person is suppose to do!

Very happy was I until I remembered that, maybe I should start looking into the “To Read” bookmarks, “Saved” on Reddit and, the holy grail, “Read Later” of Feedly.

While the “Saved” section on Reddit was mostly threads from /r/cscarrearquestions (and some memes from /r/wsb 😂) the other two places were actual interesting articles that I have planned on reading.

Host a Slack Bot in Heroku for Free

andreffs18@gmail.com (André Silva) — Sat, 28 Mar 2020 11:33:00 +0000

Update 2022-09-25: Well damn… I guess I need to think of another way to do this.

There is a Portuguese “motivational guru” called Gustavo Santos that has been in the news for some dumb reason. He’s the type of character that will say something like “A mente chama-se mente porque te mente”, and come off as super profound.

“Mind is called mind because it lies”… in Portuguese sounds “better” 😅

Docker + PostgreSQL

andreffs18@gmail.com (André Silva) — Tue, 18 Feb 2020 17:14:00 +0000

More often than not, I end up going online to look up on how to use docker as the middle man on interacting with Postgres.

Usually for me its Postgres, but this “recipe” can be applied to any piece of software that has more than one version which you don’t have installed on your laptop.

Because of this whole back and forth I compiled a small list of “how-tos” to help me remember.

Learning How to Canary Deploy with Kubernetes

andreffs18@gmail.com (André Silva) — Fri, 14 Feb 2020 09:05:00 +0000

Its true, that if the time from developing a feature to deploying it to your customers only takes minutes to hours instead of days to months, that you probably have a pretty amazing development workflow.

Im also willing to bet that a key feature of that workflow is an impeccable CI/CD pipeline, that not only allows your development team to automate a lot of time consuming and manual tasks (like building, testing, deploying, etc) but also, shortens the feedback cycle between developing->testing and testing->production.

I Really Like Emoji's

andreffs18@gmail.com (André Silva) — Fri, 15 Mar 2019 19:08:22 +0000

I came across a blogpost that explained how to add emoji’s to your terminal prompt, something like this:

The post is pretty good!

Not only explains how to add emoji’s to you prompt, but also goes a bit further on how to $RANDOM an emoji from a list of them, and bash formatting (customize the text in your terminal with colors and such).

Although I’m pretty happy with my terminal setup (shameless plug to 👉 my dotfiles👈 ), I kept coming back to this idea. It would be cool to use this, but instead of showing a random emoji in my prompt, use it as a “Welcome message” every time I open a new terminal session.

SSH ForwardAgent Gotchas

andreffs18@gmail.com (André Silva) — Tue, 05 Feb 2019 20:07:00 +0000

So, you’re trying to create an SSH Tunnel to your remote machine to make some gitlab/github clones.

That’s all fine and well until you don’t want to post your password on to the terminal.

First, look at you ~/.ssh/config file and add the “ForwardAgent yes” to that machines ip.

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Host 35.241.133.24
  IdentityFile ~/.ssh/id_rsa
  ForwardAgent yes

That says to use your local private key as identification when accessing gitlab on your remote’s machine. Then, just try to check your GitHub/Gitlab connectivity, but first, don’t forget to add you private key to your ssh-agent:

Postgres Is Now Running

andreffs18@gmail.com (André Silva) — Wed, 20 Sep 2017 10:53:00 +0000

My Macbook has OSX Mavericks installed and sometimes it crashes for no reason, breaking my local postgres server. After restarting and running again "$ brew services postgres", Postgres becomes yellow and I end up spending sometime looking confused and frustrated.

Looking at the logs you can get a sense of whats happening:

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$ tail -f /usr/local/var/postgres/server.log
FATAL:  lock file "postmaster.pid" already exists

Simply removing the lock file that Postgres generates solves this issue:

💰 Personal Finance

andreffs18@gmail.com (André Silva) — Mon, 03 Jul 2017 17:44:00 +0000

Well, after reading a couple of books on the topic, they all talk about the same thing: you should diversify your portfolio.

Code could not finish, this are some reasons why this happen. - Plot name not defined. The first parameter of the shortcode is the name. - There is a syntax error. check browser console.

The major misconception is that having different tech stocks is the same as having a diverse portfolio.

SEO Tips

andreffs18@gmail.com (André Silva) — Fri, 17 Feb 2017 00:45:32 +0000

My key takeaways from making this website “SEO friendly”:

Use link “tree structure” from homepage. This way, bots and crawlers can find every page on the website
Good titles, under 65 characters
Meta tags with good keywords under 100 characters
Use canonical urls on every page

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<link rel="canonical" href="http://localhost:1313/blog/seo-tips/">
<!-- instead of -->
<link rel="canonical" href="/blog/seo-tips">

Add “alt” tag to images

`1`	`<img alt="About me picture" src="/images/about.jpeg">`

Pre-commit hooks

Having this checklist is nice but it would be better if I didn’t have to check this by myself every time I do a side project.

Hello World

andreffs18@gmail.com (André Silva) — Wed, 09 Dec 2015 00:24:09 +0000

Hello 😃

So this is the mandatory “Hello World” blog post.

The intent of this blog is just to keep track of my achievements, projects and also:

Technical how-to/tutorials
Bugs or gotchas that might be useful in the future
Setup & configuration
Stuff that I keep forgetting and keep googling.

👋

About Me

andreffs18@gmail.com (André Silva) — Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

👋

My name is André Silva and I’m a 33 y/old Portuguese Software Engineer that lives in Edinburgh, Scotland.

# A bit about me

I wasn’t always focused on the development world.

During high school I got the chance to intern at a consulting firm in my hometown, mainly working with setting up data centers and configuring network systems.

After high school, I went to college to take a Computer Science Bachelor’s degree. During that first few months, I participated in a couple of hackathons and startup projects, primarily just for fun, but always with the goal in mind to build a curriculum and some professional experience.

Curriculum Vitae

andreffs18@gmail.com (André Silva) — Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Projects

andreffs18@gmail.com (André Silva) — Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Some of my side projects:

Flask Template

Bootstrap Flask project to use in Hackathons.

python

Santosbot

Motivational Slack bot that mimic cliché sentences from Portuguese guru, Gustavo Santos.

python3
async
heroku
vuejs

andreffs.com

This website, build with Hugo.

hugo
go
jupyter notebooks
static hosting

Sheetsu Python SDK

I had the luck of being feature for building Sheetsu's Python SDK.