Category: Uncategorized

Ulysses Blogging Review

Writing app Ulysses makes publishing and refining blog posts easy, by providing multi-device sync and a proper WordPress integration. It supports drafts, images, excerpts, tags and other metadata. It’s the best there is but it still has some rough edges…

Multi-File CircleCI Config

CircleCI configuration for complex projects can grow very large. By default you have to store all that configuration in a single .circleci/config.yml which quickly gets unmanageable. Compounded with that, is that if you are using the on-prem CircleCI Enterprise, you are limited to using CircleCI 2.0 syntax, which is missing some really useful code reuse features like… Continue reading Multi-File CircleCI Config

How to SHELL for Compatible Makefiles

The upshot is if you care about maximum compatibility with different versions of GNU Make, don’t use .SHELLFLAGS just put all your args in-line in the SHELL variable, and make sure to always always use -c as your last argument. E.g. for bash in “strict mode” But why? I really care about the out of the box development experience on projects… Continue reading How to SHELL for Compatible Makefiles

YES/NO Boolean Env Vars

I use YES and NO in environment variables to store Boolean values. I have come to the conclusion that this is in some way optimal after trying all the other obvious options and finding that each has readability flaws: 0 and 1 are confusing in POSIX shells like bash, because return 0 and exit 0 usually mean “success” (the command did not fail) which we think… Continue reading YES/NO Boolean Env Vars

Hello World

Hello world, welcome to fieldnotes.tech! Here I intend to keep my notes-to-self, code snippets, musings and other short bits & pieces on the subject of software engineering and tech in general. Most of what I’ll write here will be gleaned from working in the field and solving real issues as they arise. Some of it… Continue reading Hello World