After more than a year of hard work (besides the daily job), my book about GitLab has been published! Somewhere in the summer of 2018, a publisher approached me with the question, ‘Can you write a book about GitLab for us?’ At that time, we were migrating GitLab to a private cloud at the ING bank. I had a lot of inspiration for explaining how to scale GitLab in a corporate environment.

So, this is 2019. What is changing for me? Wel.. I am not going to spill al of my life over here, but I am planning to blog more. I totally agree with Jaron Lanier that the current social media are flawed. They are based on the ‘freemium’ model using adverts. He argues they are not ‘social’ anymore as we tend to see them but they have become ‘behavioral modification empires’.

Last 2 weeks it was ‘ateliermiddag’ again at the Prins Mauritschool in Rijswijk. These events are organised multiple times per year and the pupils of the school can do various small workshops. Together with other dads I’ve lready given a Scratch ‘programming’ course a few times in recent years. With an emphasis on the creative side to ensure that the younger pupils could join as well. It’s always been a great success.

Working professionally everyday with Gitlab has made me think twice of hosting my blog on an isolated Digital Ocean Droplet. Especially as we are promoting Devops and Continuous Delivery (for which I’ve been attending a training by Jez Humble last week!) So I’ve converted my blog to use Gitlab Pages. This means my entire blog resides in texfiles in Gitlab(.com) and whenever I push a new version of the code, the Gitlab runners build my blog using a Static Site Generator (Hexo).

Als je er op gaat letten, is het opvallend dat kinderboeken zo vol staan met stereotiepe rolpatronen. Stichting Zo-ook heeft hier onderzoek naar gedaan en wil kennis en bewustwording vergroten en ook het aanbod niet-stereotiepe kinderboeken vergroten. Daarom zijn zij pas geleden met een crowdfunding campagne gestart om het uitgeven van een boek met niet-stereotiepe rolpatronen mogelijk te maken. Zij willen hiermee laten zien dat het ook anders kan. Niet met het argument dat het ene rolpatroon goed is en het andere slecht, maar om ervoor zorgen dat kinderen meerdere rolpatronen zien, dat ze andere rolmodellen zien.

{% codeblock [First code] [lang:bash] %} var express = require(‘express’, template = require(‘pug’)); var session = require(‘express-session’) var util = require(‘util’); var oauth = require(‘oauth’); {% endcodeblock %} So what is this? It is the first code I used for the backend part of our project at the ING Hackathon 2017 in Katowice, Poland. It was held at Walcownia Cynku,a former Zinc rolling Mill (big scary machines!). The logo I was part of a team of 6 people and we had a great time.

Currently I am working on a project where we need to create Excel reports from a datasource. There are several ways to do this programmatically, but our first thought was to do this in Java. We actually abandoned this path later on and went for something with Nodejs, but I’ll share my thoughts on the Java road nonetheless. There are several Java libraries available which enable read-write of Excel sheet formats.

I truly believe coding software should be part of the curriculum of young people. Kids can learn to express themselves digitally. Currently the primary school that my kids attend does not have resources for this kind of tuition. So I decided to offer my assistance in organising two courses (2x 2 hours) in Scratch programming. Scratch is a visual programming language designed by MIT media labs in 2003. The kids were able to create some nice games in that timeframe!

I have started a small github project for hosting a demo test. In this project there is an Appium test for the TodoMVC app we built in earlier posts and this test can be run on Sauce Labs with accompanying scripts. First thing is to get a trial account at Sauce Labs. BTW, Sauce Labs, Inc. is at Microsoft’s Build conference right now and they have announced better support for Visual Studio (with a plugin) and the fact that Microsoft itself is going to support the same automation API (the JSON Wire Protocol).

By choosing for Cordova as an App container, most developers aim to build an app that should run on the iOS and Android platform from one codebase. In the last post I demonstrated how to embed a javascript React App in Cordova on the Android platform, now I will do so for iOS (on a Mac). A quick recap to make this work (repeating steps from former posts): In Part1 and Part2 (Android version) I used the ‘npm start’ command to create the concatenated javascript file bundle.