Articles

Was UserBenchmark right?

Was UserBenchmark right about brands and AMD? Perhaps not quite, but reviewers are ruthless and communities seem to love hating certain brands or products.

For the longest time ever, the UserBenchmark site has gotten a...

The AI art discourse and programming

While I'm in the middle of considering migrating this blog to a different CMS or even a static site generator, I was linked an article by a friend. You can go and read it yourself here, but I thought that it's...

Throw your message into the void

I sometimes catch myself struggling wanting to get the last word, or leave a comment that's not entirely objective in code review, or want to get something out even knowing it doesn't contribute to the conversation....

Unity Runtime Fee: a look at some numbers

For the past few months I've been pretty busy with all sorts of development: I've been working on a video game of my own, in addition to some webdev and benchmarking of some technologies and most recently,...

Ever wanted to read thousands of tech blogs? Now you can!

If you just want to see the site I made, feel free to scroll to the summary at the bottom. Otherwise, keep reading!

A few days ago, I saw an interesting thread on Hacker News: "Ask HN...

Terrains in Godot: Not Quite Ready Yet

There are quite a few game engines out there: from the very popular Unity, to the technologically advanced Unreal Engine, but there are also recent contenders like the open source Godot Engine. Personally,...

Ansible and Docker: a useful match made in hell

I am currently working on a blog post where I intend to compare the real world performance of the Nginx and Apache2 web servers in similar circumstances. As a part of that, I also decided to setup An...

My house almost caught fire, so I am quitting my job

At the time of writing this, I'm about to have my last day at the company that I've worked in for approximately the last 5 or so years, as I've submitted my resignation a little while ago. I figu...

Software developer job interview questions to ask

After finishing up my previous article about how to not let the software development process become too cumbersome with time, I thought that I'd also write about another topic that's relevant right...

The Unethical Developer's Guide to Personal Success

Here's an article that I wanted to post at the start of the year, yet got stuck debating whether I should even do that at all, whether it would send the wrong message. It will probably be fine. Fr...

Using AI for learning programming

In the recent years, AI has gotten a lot of attention. At first, a lot of it was hype around what the technology could some day do, but more recently there have been gradual improvements with some practical applica...

A week of Linux instead of Windows

This week is my vacation from work, during which I wanted to relax from enterprise code, as well as work on a more substantial project of my own: DevProject 2022, where I attempt to demonstrate cloud native applic...

How boring or novel should your technology choices be

Let's talk about technology choices today! It's early weekend here and I just read a nice article on HN titled: "How boring should your team's codebases be". It made me have some thoughts of m...

Porting the Godot LOD plugin from GDScript to C sharp

Quick note: for whatever reason, "#" won't show up in the title. Might be a bug, edited the title accordingly.

So, today I had to be on call for work, in case someone else's (or my own) code d...

Want quick answers? Ask questions well!

This post is also available as a website.

In our modern day world, focus is paramount to getting things done. Every interruption introduces context switching, which makes productivity suffer. Thus, it c...

On burnout

I recently got burnt out from doing software development, so let's talk about it!

I am already on vacation to decompress and decided that now is a pretty good time to do some introspection and explore what causes stress in my daily wor...

Software updates as clean wipes

After taking a bit of a pause from writing blog articles (due to starting to stream on Twitch), I figured that I might as well continue with some of my article ideas!

So, let's talk about updates today! The simple...

Using Ubuntu as the base for all of my containers

Up until now, i had considered using Alpine as the base image for my OCI containers (be it with Docker or otherwise), because it felt like a pretty good and minimalistic option, which should be good...

Goodbye GitLab; Hello Gitea, Nexus and Drone

It is pretty late evening over here and i've been hard at work for the past two days, my entire weekend: first while trying to update GitLab to a newer version from my ancient and neglected instance due...

My journey from ad hoc chaos to order (a tale of legacy code, services and containers)

Recently, there was a discussion on HackerNews about Kubernetes, containers and other ways to manage services. One of the arguments that i heard was also one tha...

The good things in the current age in tech

In the industry, we often talk about the more negative aspects that cause us strife - frameworks that are out of date, hard problems that no one really has concerete solutions and so on. But every now and...

Remote working and the elephant in the room

The COVID pandemic largely forced the industry to adapt to remote working conditions for a number of months. It does seem like we'll eventually get over the pandemic and life will return to normal, with f...

Stable Software Release System

A while ago, i wrote an article called "Never update anything" that brought to light some of the issues with our current approaches to versioning software and the shortcomings of semantic versioning in particular. H...

Docker Swarm over Kubernetes

A little while back someone asked a question on Reddit:

Why docker swarm is not popular as Kubernetes?

Having a few thoughts to share, i responded with my personal experience. However, i thought that it would ac...

Never update anything

Here's a fair warning: this article is reductio ad absurdum, therefore you shouldn't take it as gospel. However, i do believe that this point of view is extreme enough that it usually gets shut down immediately, yet doesn't...

On technological illiteracy

Just recently, my dad asked me how to view a file that someone had shared with him through e-mail, some project documents from a colleague. Upon viewing the e-mail it became obvious to me, that not only would he not be a...

What it truly takes to get a web app running

Recently, in a discussion over on Hacker News, someone expressed displeasure at how complicated running apps is in the modern day and age:

Why is this so hard & tedious. I've seen enough infrastruc...

On finances and savings

Let's tackle another social topic that's typically not talked about due to stigma, shall we? I've had lots of discussions with people in private about finances, savings, the importance of purchasing power parity (PPP) or lac...

How i organize my Docker deployments in 2021

A post on Reddit over at /r/selfhosted asked people to share how they organize their Docker containers. I did see that the majority of the people there simply used Docker Compose or something of the so...

manavakcina.lv and apturicovid.lv

Having participated in the creation of https://apturicovid.lv (well, actually all of what you see on the site was written by me, including the APIs that fetch the data and the private CMS, excluding the text cont...

How i migrate apps between servers in 2021

There are plenty of reasons for why you might want to migrate an app over to another server. For example, hardware resources are better suited to hosting it on another node (SSD instead of HDD, a better CP...

My thoughts while working on a Master's degree in 2020

So, the other day i had just finished working on the first full draft of my Master's degree, which was when i got an e-mail from my supervisor which included the following bit of text:

"The...

COVID-19 contact tracing with Bluetooth vs GPS tracking and the unexplored potential for these apps

Disclaimer: I was 1 of the approximately 100 specialists who participated in the Apturi Covid project (i created the homepage), however the views...

Moduliths: because we need to scale, but we also cannot afford microservices

So, let's get one thing straight: if you're working in ICT, you're probably not in FAANG. Unless you are, in which case, good job at getting there! But for the rest of us,...