When my girlfriend and I moved in together, we decided to sit down each Saturday and plan ahead what we we're going to eat the following week. We used to do this with pen and paper but as a few weeks passed I thought: why are we doing this the old school way? Don't get me wrong: pen and paper get the job done efficiently but it doesn't allow us to check what's for dinner when we aren't home.

So a couple of weeks ago I decided to make a digital version of our weekly meal planner. In this post I'll show you how we use Trello and AWS Lambda to create an semi-automated weekly meal planner.

Continue reading →

Last week Atlassian announced a new feature for BitBucket called Pipelines. It’s a continuous integration service that is integrated into BitBucket and is powered by Docker. I immediately signed up for the closed beta and received my invite shortly afterwards, yay!

I wondered if BitBucket Pipelines could replace my Jenkins server. I mostly use Jenkins to automate the deployment of websites to a FTP server and to Amazon S3. In this post I’ll show you how to configure BitBucket Pipelines to deploy your website to a FTP server or to Amazon S3 (with s3_website).

Continue reading →

After waiting months for an invite, I finally got an e-mail (on my birthday!) from Scaleway telling me that I was invited to try out their cloud servers. I quickly accepted the invite, created an account, setup billing and created my first Scaleway "Starter Cloud" server. This server would replace my RamNode VPS and is going to host my Jenkins installation, a personal wiki, a VPN server and netdata.

But instead of installing everything straight onto the server, I figured it would be better to use some kind of virtualization to separate and contain each service. Full virtualization is not well supported by Scaleway and requires a lot of memory. So instead I decided to use LXC: Linux Containers. In this post I'll show you how I have configured my server with LXC, how I route traffic to containers and how I use Nginx as a reverse proxy for the containers.

Continue reading →

On the 13th of April 2009 at exactly 21:08 I ordered a new MacBook Pro from the Apple online store. This was the first 15 inch MacBook Pro with the unibody design and it replaced my PowerBook G4. It was only my second Mac and I've used it throughout high school, throughout college and now I carry it with me to work. It's been the best investment I have ever made. In fact I'm still using it today and I've used it to write blog posts, to create this website, to create video tutorials for my YouTube channel, to setup servers, …

In this post I'll review my 8 year old MacBook Pro. To see how well it has hold up over the years. It’s a tribute to a legendary computer (at least for me) and this seems like a fun thing to do!

Continue reading →

Gone are the days of manually deploying code to servers! I recently started using Jenkins to deploy several simple websites that I've built over the years. However, some of these websites are hosted on a shared webhosting. This means: no shell access available for pushing a git repository to it. In this post I'll show you how to configure Jenkins to deploy websites with FTP.

Continue reading →