A good day with the boys on the course today. The big yin and I didn’t play too great, but the wee guy played brilliantly.
Good GitLab features for devs building on the side
Over the weekend, I spent time getting my GitLab account, working with a single repository, and migrating the CI script from GitHub to GitLab.
The biggest issue was the CI script, and why shouldn’t it be? There’s rarely a “one script fits all” regarding CI scripts. When I started this project, I had issues getting the CI script working in GitHub. After a few pushes on the one branch, I eventually got there. Migrating this script to GitLab’s CI ways was more straightforward than I thought, but I still had a few issues I managed to resolve.
In addition to all the usual source code management goodies that GitLab offers, a few stood out.
Private repositories are available on GitLab’s free tier. Having used GitLab in the past, I already knew this, but it’s refreshing to see that GitLab is sticking with offering this feature on a free tier.
Feature flags are available on GitLab’s free tier. They are a means of configuring how your code behaves by using toggles and checks to ensure that it only carries out certain functionality. I have a number of feature flags in my application, but they are all based on a YML file in the source code. I will be migrating these to GitLab, though, so that I can toggle them without having to deploy any changes to the YML file that controls them.
Error tracking is available on GitLab’s free tier. Previously, I used Sentry for this, but GitLab also uses Sentry under the hood for their own error tracking feature. Yes, I can probably get more information by having a dedicated Sentry account, but at the moment, I am just checking to see if users raise any errors in the application.
For developers building on the side, these features on GitLab’s free tier are of great value and definitely swing my vote from GitHub to GitLab. Over the next few weeks, I hope to migrate the feature flags over, use more of GitLab’s platform, and see what it can help me with.
Juggling some apps again
I’ve been juggling several app changes over the past few weeks.
Gone are the GitHub and Copilot accounts and subscriptions I used to build a product. I’ve replaced them with a GitLab account on the free tier. The GitLab free tier offers quite a lot compared to GitHub, but there are downsides, like no security alerts. However, I can manage for the moment. I’m still not sold on the GitLab Duo subscription, but I’ve covered that with the following subscription change.
I upgraded my ChatGPT account to the Plus plan over the last month, and I think I will keep it for the immediate future. It’s not quite as integrated as Copilot when it comes to assisting with coding, but it works well for diagnosing issues in my code when needed. I also use it more when searching the web for something specific. I still use DuckDuckGo for general searches that I can filter by the most relevant results, but I use ChatGPT for more targeted searches.
Finally, after a few months with Ulysses, I’m just not using it how I thought I would, so I downloaded Bear again and started moving some of my notes over to that to start using it again. Bear feels less formal than Ulysses, which is why I don’t think Ulysses is sticking for me.
We’ll see how the change goes over the next few weeks.
For the first time this year, I’m working from outside in the back garden. Over the summer, I’ll work a lot more between here and the golf club. Once all the usual chores have been done, I’ll share a picture of the back garden office.
After a much-needed lazy Saturday morning, I spent the afternoon doing a dry run of the base for my greenhouse. The bricks are lined up and level, but they need a final layer of concrete to keep them in place. I’m happy with the first run at it, though.
With all the recent activity and updates to browsers and search engines such as Brave and Kagi, I’m still happy and content with DuckDuckGo and Firefox. They continue to work well for me and do what I need them to do.
I’ve been flying under the radar for the last couple of weeks due to circumstances beyond my control. Now that everything is settling back to normal, I can follow my usual plan and get a few things back on track.
I spent the better part of a day preparing a section of the garden for the new greenhouse. Now, I’m reaping the benefits of a hard day’s work by chilling on the couch with a rum, watching golf, and doing some Rails coding on my MacBook.
Hats off to DNSimple’s contact form for support. It includes a dropdown of accounts you are logged into. Being able to select an account makes contacting them much easier and narrows down the location of the reported issue. This is a simple but effective way to improve customer feedback.
My initial experience with Kamal hasn’t been great. At the start of the year, I spent a few days at best with it, but I kept running into issues, which eventually got forgotten. I’m restarting again with Kamal, as I feel it could be of real benefit in hosting my own apps.
I missed some glorious golfing weather over the weekend as I finished painting the hall. With that done, all our major home decorating plans are complete, and I can enjoy the outdoors and golf until around October.
Picked up a couple more of these notebooks from Atoms to Astronauts.
Good quality paper and the covers are superb. Picked up the astronomy and geology notebooks this time.
They’re catching on in the Lang household as my youngest asked for a couple as well.
Spring, the planning season
A recent trend in my RSS feeds and newsletters is that March is a month for preparing and planning and is the start of a seasonal way of implementing those plans.
Seth Godin recently blogged about March being the strategy month.
But March? Around the world, March can be a chance to get down to the work we committed to do.
Invest 31 days into outlining, discussing and fleshing out the strategy you want to bring to your career or your project. It doesn’t matter how fast you’re going if you’re headed in the wrong direction.
Mike Vardy also wrote in his newsletter that if you feel left behind, don’t worry.
If you’ve been feeling behind, let me be clear: you’re not behind—you’re right on time. This is your moment to decide—what do you want this year to really be about?
Finally, Austin Kleon also discussed living seasonally in his newsletter. Now is the time to plant those ideas for the year ahead. Austin Kleon’s newsletter got me thinking about how March is the month for starting a new one—not with resolutions, but with plans.
New Year’s resolutions used to be a thing for me, but I never saw them through. I would get a few weeks in every year, and my resolutions would fall by the wayside. After a time, I gave up on the notion that January would be the start of something new.
The problem with resolutions is that they are decisions that are attempted at the change of a day, and they are made when most of us are getting over the last of the holidays. It can be challenging to make adjustments and see decisions through. You need more time to prepare and see those decisions through.
March is traditionally a time for planting in the garden. Just last weekend, we started planting our tomato and chilli seeds. Next weekend, we’ll look to start planting flowers and herbs. I also have some plans to put a permanent greenhouse in the garden instead of the plastic ones I have been using.
Next weekend, I will start building a base for the greenhouse to sit on, and hopefully, by April, I’ll have a more permanent place for growing through the summer.
While our plans for the garden will take time, they will yield results with time and care throughout the summer and into the autumn.
I’ve got other plans for this year outside of the garden. These plans will take time, but using the year’s seasons is a better way of planning for the year ahead. I will use the next few months to get some plans in place, both for in and outside the garden.
I finished reading Dust, the last of the Silo series by Hugh Howey.
I thoroughly enjoyed the books. It’s also good to finally have finished a series of books, as it’s been a while since I’ve done that.