Maintaining a fork of a repository

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.

Warning: Istio is being downgraded

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.

Istio VM workloads

Update 2023.11.10: The original post was long and contained a lot of code, right in your face. Since I tidied up the accompanying repository, I am making the following changes: The default ingress is turned on. Removing large code blocks, replacing them with invocation and functional description.

YugabyteDB build infrastructure upgrade

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.

yq - the yaml power tool

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.

Windows Terminal text selection productivity tips

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.

Istio, cert-manager, Let’s Encrypt and HTTPS redirect

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:

Privacy settings updates

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.

What does not scale in software

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.

Zanzibar with Prolog - summary

Up until about a month ago, my understanding of how Zanzibar was supposed to work was wrong. Some quick notes: I completely misunderstood Section 2.3. of the whitepaper. The pseudo-code notation is, in fact, a namespace configuration language. Zanzibar tuples aren’t enough to infer relationships in a Zanzibar-style system.