Keyword: Open Source

Several years ago, I began to self-host some services and it's quite fun to do. Today, as I'm now working as a devops/sysadmin I will explain what self-hosting is, its pros and cons and how to improve practices.

People may say that Windows Phone is a bad operating system because it has few apps and it is even abandoned by Microsoft itself. And Android should be good, but it is not so simple. Having switched to Android from Windows phone, there are some things I now miss.

Among the reasons why I bought the Fairphone 2 is its engagement about open source. I wish with this phone to rely the most possible on free software and to control everything on my phone. This way, I'm not obliged to always buy new hardware because of software updates even though it's still working. Also, I can use the services I wish like my own cloud (powered by Owncloud haha!) instead of Google's, Apple's or Microsoft's clouds on which I don't know what is happening. Good news: Fairphone released its own open source operating system based on Android called Fairphone Open.

I got to know Vue.js about two months ago and was greatly impressed by the quality of its guide and API. Imagine. There is one guy alone maintaining the framework and he manages to keep an up-to-date documentation. Since then, he has got to search for more people, and the team is increasing in size, but very slowly. So, seduced by the way the documentation is clearly written and easy to understand, I decided to try Vue.js on a teamwork I had to do for a company as part of my studies. I had to develop a dashboard displaying data and charts when clicking on points on a map. Before the dashboard I first had to process 100GB of data to get only the interesting information and to aggregate this information into one simple PostgreSQL database (the final data was no more than 25MB afterwards). This was also an incredible work, but I won't talk about it in this post.

The new v1.0.0 version of Qowala is almost finished! This open source dashboard on which we are working with my team has all the features planned for letting you follow people and hashtags on Twitter and interact with them. We are just fixing some little things and making the presentation website before releasing it ;). If you wish to see how it looks, just come and try the official instance. We are willing to have a lot of feedback to improve it :D .

It may happen to you as it did to me to sometimes read messages with "tofu" characters in it: these boxes with numbers in it. It means they can't be displayed with the fonts installed on your machine. Before, I didn't pay much attention to it because I could still read the message, but I really got interested while working on Qowala when some messages had only this kind of characters.

When I began coding, I first used Notepad++ only available on Windows. Then, as a lot of new coders, I switched to Sublime Text which has nice syntaxic coloration and also an easy-to-install package manager who gives access to lots of plugins. However, I was using it without having bought the license so one day I decided to check other text editors and if I don't find something better, I buy the license for Sublime Text.

Some time has passed since the last release of Qowala and the fourth beta is now out. Actually, it took time to bring out this new beta because we were working on the v1.0.0 at the same time! Qowala is getting nicer and nicer so here are some news.

If you use SSH keys and you have to enter the password every time to unlock them, you surely have already tried to set up a keyring. However, it is not always very clear how to do it as they are several ways of doing it.

When I work on projects organized as microservices, if I only update the part on which I work, it can happen that they are some bugs. It is then often needed to update regularly all Git repositories. So, I made a little Bash script as I did not found it elsewhere.