As an Integration consultant I spend my time using all sorts of integration products, whether those are ESBs, API management products or queueing mechanisms. Recently I’ve had the chance to experiment a little bit with an Azure API manager PoC. Since I ran into some issues I decided I wanted to write it down here for reference and to solidify the knowledge in my head.
More …Lately I’ve been diving into API mocking more as I wanted to reproduce some scenarios on my local environment due to not being able to on the remote machines I was given access to. The few people I talked to about it came up with a few different free tools; castlemock and wiremock. Having only heard of wiremock but having never really tried either of them I had a go at running both. But in the end I ended up choosing another tool entirely.
More …In the past I wrote a blog about generating this blog with Jekyll but I don’t think I mentioned the hardware in it. Originally this blog was hosted on a Raspberry pi 3B, with low power and small form factor being a big reason. (Apart from it being fun to use of course). While cleaning and giving much of my unused hardware a new home with new owners the Raspberry pi zero w also passed through my hands. I had originally bought it to do a tiny weather forecast viewer project. It was based on a cool project on hackaday but while fun I didn’t really need it. At first I wondered who might be interested in it. But then I realised it should also probably be enough to run my blog at an even smaller footprint, so I kept it to migrate the blog to.
More …Naming conventions, everywhere I’ve been people want them, but are the resulting conventions correct and actually used? That’s a question I keep asking myself once in a while. Lately even more now that I’m about halfway through “The Programmers Brain” by Felienne Hermans who is a computer science professor and does research in programming education. While the integration field does not necessarily share all the different problems you might run into with regular programming, one of the omnipresent problems remains - Property naming. Reading the book, I wanted to write down my thoughts on the subject.
More …I think most people have imagined themselves as something or another at one point in time. In the past the required knowledge or skills to bring this into art were far greater than my talents and will to learn. So generally I would ask artistic friends and pay them for their services. Unfortunately for them those days are disappearing with the advent of LLMs and generative AI. Now I would never say that it can completely replace any artist, the datasets have to come from somewhere and from what I’ve seen often the generated art can still lack a bit of “Soul” for a lack of a better word. Either way as a curious person I wanted to have a go with these image generation models. I experimented a bit with it in the past when stable diffusion first hit the zeitgeist but it wasn’t as accessible as I wanted yet. Of course there were options to use various “Apps” but those often involved giving your private pictures and details to various companies and developers somewhere around the world. Instead I wanted to do it locally. In this blog I will link to the helpful posts I used which started my experimentation with stable diffusion.
More …It’s been a while since i’ve been able to write a post. Just after I put this blog on LinkedIn life got a lot busier so here we are. I did spend a bunch of time on various side projects and trying out different tools so I do have more subjects to write about than ever. So this short post is mostly about my latest foray into reinstalling my homelab with some different OS. Over the past year I’ve ran RedHat CentOS Stream on it after Centos 8 was deprecated. I did not quite follow the whole community blowout with a bunch of people splitting off from Redhat and starting “Rocky Linux” as a bug for bug replacement so I just tried out Centos Stream by Redhat instead which was their supposedly “continously updated” alernative. But after a while it was time for a change again.
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