I have been experimenting with LLMs for some time, and now it is the right moment to talk about it. My experience formed mainly through interactions with OpenAI ChatGPT. Very low barrier of entry. I used it for code generation, what else!

Sometimes I find myself having to maintain a fork of an upstream open source project. This can be for various reasons. For example, it could be because a bug fix is needed and it will take some time until that fix makes upstream, or I require some completely custom changes that do not fit in the scope of the upstream project.

You are upgrading Istio and a message like this pops up:

WARNING: Istio is being downgraded from 1.20.0 to 1.19.3.
         Before upgrading, you may wish to use 'istioctl x precheck' to check for upgrade warnings.

Not very obvious what happens the first time one comes across this.

A couple of weeks ago I had a pleasure talking to Denis Magda and Franck Pachot from Yugabyte about my past Postgres foreign data wrapper contributions to the awesome YugabyteDB RDBMS. We discussed the whys and the hows, and reflected on my experiences as a contributor. Thanks for having me!

The jq tool was a game-changer for JSON on the command line. Before jq manipulating JSON data meant invoking programs in third-party languages. jq changed that for the better. But the world has moved on, more and more people have adopted YAML. There was a need for a YAML processing jq-like tool—the yq.

I am a heavy macOS user but my current work requires the use of Windows and its Terminal for WSL2. Working with Windows Terminal was very frustrating until I changed a couple of settings:

• Copy-on-select.
• Set the word delimiters setting to match the one of iTerm2.

copy-on-select

Selecting text automatically copies it to the clipboard. No need to hit CTRL+C to copy. This is a massive time saver. To enable copy-on-select:

I’m running Istio 1.16.1 with cert-manager 1.11.0 ClusterIssuer pointed at Let’s Encrypt using HTTP-01 challenge. I have a gateway with a virtual service and I would like to automatically redirect all HTTP traffic to HTTPS. Except of the Let’s Encrypt challenge. Because, after Let’s Encrypt documentation¹:

On 5th of July I have made a number of changes to the privacy settings on this website. Without going too much into detail about reasons:

• This website no longer uses Google Analytics.
• Theme fonts are no longer loaded from Google Fonts service. They’re now served from the gruchalski.com domain.
  • If you’d like to do the same, here’s a good place to start: https://github.com/radekg/google-font-download.
• The newsletter has been cancelled. Mailchimp decided to nuke my account some time ago anyway.
• I have rolled out self-hosted analytics service. About the analytics service:
  • Reside in German Hetzner Online GmbH data centers.
  • Captured data is not shared, and never will be shared with third-parties.
  • Respects your Do Not Track setting.
  • Does not use cookies.
  • Data is public and can be viewed here.
  • Contains data starting from 5th of July 2023.

The Privacy page has been updated accordingly.

Regardless of the technology, most general-purpose software is easy.

• There’s a set of requirements.
• Someone implements said requirements.
• Code gets tested, problems are fixed, and code issues are resolved.
• Code is promoted to production.
• New requirements come in, and the process repeats.
• Dependencies change. Someone tests them and releases a new version.

Like anything else critical to the business, software needs to be monitored. Every aspect from the list above can be streamlined and/or automated.