A few months ago, I got tired of leading Greenruby publication and Xenor accepted to jump in and take the publisher role. I’m very grateful about it. But as a secundary effect, I lost that ranting channel I got used to abuse. Each week, I was getting somehow acustomed to send some rant with the list of links.

Now it’s time to get back into a publisher mood. I have various thoughts that could deserve sharing, or at least, publication. Well I don’t tweet much and I hate facebook, so my media coverage may be a little tiny.

But that’s not really a problem. It’s not like I have some agenda. I just wish to exercise my right to reflect aloud on various topics, bring to the open some personal and/or original thoughts. Nothing more. Whoever reads, do it in silence.

Well, since that whole blogging thing began, I never have been very active on it. Well, I have a blog on Tumblr because I wanted to know how they are doing it, I published various posts in the faria devtips, and after all, this rant could also count as a publication. So I think I will gather them all under one unique site. A Jekyll github-pages kind, easy and cheap.

After all, I’m not sure the devtips website will stay up any longer. There have been no post since the day I left. Too bad. It’s a demonstration that some collective actions can sometimes rely only on the energy of one person.

So, I made a new repo on github for it, and I will gather whatever stuff I can find that I wrote in there.

Lovely FreeBSD

At our Gandi office in Taipei I had to install a pfsense server, which is based on FreeBSD. It was quite a pleasant experience, actually. Last time I played a bit with BSD that was 12 years ago, and that was not very smooth. I’m happy to be given that occasion to see how it goes now.

For now I’m going to use it like if it was an OpenWRT with some extra OpenVPN abilities. And it will also be a file server for the LAN. Not sure yet how I will handle that.

Ruby package management

When I got in my new job, I discovered a new way to manage server management. They didn’t want to use rvm, or even ruby gems, or pip or anything that is not debian packages. It may sound quite harsh. Since I came in ruby in 2010, rvm has been my best friend, bundle the second one. But this approach is very developer-based. When you maintain large and stable systems, it’s more likely that you will not trust the bleeding edge stuff and prefer confirmed publication of packages before using them. This is an interesting slap on my face.

Of course there are the brightbox packages for Ubuntu, but that’s missing the point. A release has to be out for a certain time so it can be strengthened by security reviews and proper production usage. There is a part of the population for each language that is considering the instability of current releases a normal trade-off. but there is a huge lot of other companies that will wait patiently that things get stable enough for their taste.