Written by Sebastian on Jan 01, 2023 in dev
Building OneSen in public
Sebastian Göttschkes
Written by Sebastian on Feb 03, 2021 in dev
Phoenix UI testing with Cypress, Part 1
I still remember the days I tried to achieve UI testing with Selenium, PhantomJS and various other tools. It was a hassle. It didn’t run on CI because it needed some kind of window manager. It was unstable.
Written by Sebastian on Nov 03, 2017 in dev
Quickstart guide for clojure (compojure), clojurescript (figwheel), garden
Setting up new projects is always exciting, but if you have done it a few times, it’s getting old quick. I have set up a few projects in the last time and I believe I have a nice setup going which I’m about to share with everybody interested. There is nothing new in here and if you are a seasoned Clojure developer, you might not learn much. If you are just starting out or have some work done in Clojure but need a working setup or some input on your current setup, you are at the right place.
Written by Sebastian on Oct 23, 2017 in dev
My personal state of Clojure
Almost a year ago I wrote my last blog post on this blog. It wasn’t planned, it just happened. I was busy doing other, unrelated things and while I sometimes had something to say, I never took the time to take it to my blog. As with many things which are not top priority, it got lost along the way.
Written by Sebastian on Dec 21, 2016 in dev
(clojure 2) Getting used to
After “The setup“ and “The beginning“, my time with Clojure was somewhat limited due to pre-christmas stress. But this gave me time to reflect on what I learned so far, what I liked and didn’t like. I also attended the December Meetup by (clojure ‘vienna) and pair programmed Clojure for a few hours.
Written by Sebastian on Dec 08, 2016 in dev
(clojure 1) The beginning
After “The setup“, I dove right into Clojure. As said before, I want to get to know Clojure by working on Advent of Code (AoC). I realize that coding puzzles and dojos and katas are not real world applications and one might miss certain things like performance or running an application in production. But they are small enough to provide fast feedback and to not hit a big wall. Even if I am not able to solve one, I can always skip that and keep going with another puzzle.
Written by Sebastian on Dec 05, 2016 in dev
(clojure 0) The setup
In the last week I started playing with Clojure. The reason for this are some upcoming projects with the blossom Team. The stack will most likely be Clojure in the backend and ClojureScript in the frontend. So I better up my game. I started with the Advent of Code to have some real world exposure and not just write complicated “Hello, World” code. I’m planning on writing a series of blog posts, documenting my journey.
Written by Sebastian on Sep 14, 2016 in freelance
An experiment
In the upcoming weeks, I’d like to do an experiment involving Pokemon Go and the in-game currency Pokecoins. In short: I’ll work with a specific client for 2 hours each week doing my usual work and I’ll use the resulting money to buy Pokecoins. This work will be done on top of my current work.
Written by Sebastian on Feb 29, 2016 in dev
Idempotent version updates with Ansible
If you are a seasoned Vagrant user, you know the problem around provisioning. If some software version changes, everybody needs to provision his or her machine again. Otherwise, things will fail eventually. You’ll also run into problems if running the provisioning twice fails for some reason (e.g. because a file already exists somewhere).
Written by Sebastian on Jan 21, 2016 in dev
Dart, Vagrant and IDEs
Using Vagrant in order to have a reproducible development environment is second nature to me. All projects I work on have a Vagrantfile and it usually works great.
Written by Sebastian on Dec 11, 2015 in dev
Google App Engine Remote API within iPython Notebooks
At blossom, we are running on Google App Engine (GAE). It’s nice to stand on the shoulder of giants and don’t have to worry about servers at all. GAE takes care of scaling up and down for us, handles our database as well as storage and gives us great insight into our production environment.
Written by Sebastian on Sep 20, 2015 in productivity
What works for me
I struggle like most people with getting things done. I have read books and a lot of blog posts. Most didn’t work. I have implement some of the things David Allen suggests in “Getting things done”. I am keeping my inbox at zero most days with the tips from Andreas Klinger. But that’s about it. Nothing else ever worked - 5/3/1 tasks for the day, Pomodoro, keeping hand-written task lists, using various apps.
Written by Sebastian on Sep 13, 2015 in dev
Deploying to PythonAnywhere with TravisCI
Many of you might already know it: Soon I’ll be joining the blossom Team on their quest to project management awesomeness. The current development stack of blossom consists of Python and Dart running on Google App Engine. In order to get some experience with both Python and Dart, I started a small side project which is a perfect combination of my two main interests, development and music.
Written by Sebastian on Sep 04, 2015 in Community
Just ask!
What did you do last time you had a problem? The last time you couldn’t figure something out? Some people quit. Others try to force a solution on their own, applying insane amounts of time towards a problem. Often though, asking questions to the right people is the way to go.
Written by Sebastian on Aug 21, 2015 in dev
PhantomJS 2 on Wheezy and TravisCI
After playing with Dart for a little while, I also looked into testing with Dart and learned that the test library can use PhantomJS to test the code that interacts with the DOM. Being a testing junkie, I wanted to give this a try but learned that I needed PhantomJS 2 to get it working. Beside running it in my VM, I also wanted to have it running on TravisCI. This blog post tells you how to set up both.
Written by Sebastian on Jul 30, 2015 in health
My first few days with Jake
As announced on twitter, last week I ordered a batch of Jake. It arrived on Wednesday and I had to try it out the same evening. I’d like to share some thoughts about it and reactions I received. It’s only been a few days, so this is not some extensive review of the product or anyting.
Written by Sebastian on Jul 25, 2015 in dev
Deploying a Jekyll website to Github Pages using TravisCI
Today I switched over this blog to be subject to continous deployment. Whenever I push a new commit (which might be a design change, new blog post like this or some small change), everything is build and automatically pushed to Github Pages, which host this blog.
Written by Sebastian on Mar 25, 2015 in dev
Running Ansible devel (on Codeship)
If you are tasked with managing servers, you might have read about Ansible. If you do not know it, here is a quick intro: With Ansible you can define tasks which should be run on your (remote) hosts and Ansible takes those tasks, opens a ssh connection into your hosts and executes them.
Written by Sebastian on Jan 27, 2015 in dev
Vagrant base boxes
If you are using vagrant on a daily basis, you might already be using something else than the base box suggested by vagrant (which would be the hashicorp/precise32 or hashicorp/precise64). If you are thinking about creating your own base boxes or are interested in the topic, read on. If you have no idea what I am talking about, the vagrant documentation can tell you more about Boxes.
Written by Sebastian on Jan 18, 2015 in dev
Developing cllctr
Over the past two month, I have been building a new weekend project: cllctr. It’s a CD database you can use to store information about your CDs. Say goodbye to excel lists and over-the-top stuff as discogs or collectorz. cllctr is focused on the right amount of data, balancing the time needed to enter new CDs or organize a exisiting collection.
Written by Sebastian on Oct 28, 2014 in dev
Vagrant and tmpfs
When I am talking about Vagrant at usergroups and conferences, one thing I always mention is that shared folders are slow, especially with Virtualbox. While it’s true for reading to some extend, the biggest bottleneck I experience is writing to the shared folder. This happens a lot with cache and logs in development mode when you use e.g. symfony2. These folders live inside the project dir and depending on your project structure you might not be able to redirect them to some folder inside the vm.
Written by Sebastian on Aug 01, 2014 in community
Join us at ViennaPHP
If you are a PHP developer who lives in Vienna, you might have heared of ViennaPHP. It’s a local usergroup organized by Stefan Hupe and myself to bring together the PHP community.
Written by Sebastian on Jun 28, 2014 in dev
Jekyll: Update your sitemap automatically with rake
If you write your blog to also be found through Google, you may have a sitemap which makes it easy for Google and Bing to crawl your page. It might be good idea to inform both if this sitemap changes so they can send their crawlers your way and update their index with the great stuff you just put on their. This can be done by doing a GET request and passing the url to your sitemap as a parameter. Easy as pie, right?
Written by Sebastian on May 31, 2014 in tools
Backups with Obnam
You know you should do backups, right? Taking all those data you store on your laptop and put it somewhere safe. There are so many ways of doing backups but people still don’t do regular backups. Maybe you put the data on an external drive and swear you’ll do this every month from now on. Chances are you’ll be to busy next month and the month after. And you still got a backup, right?
Written by Sebastian on May 23, 2014 in blogging
From Phrozn to Jekyll
As you might know by now, I like static side generators. They combine the flexibility of a templating system with the easy deployment of static pages. Creating pages feels like working in a programming language and deploying the page in the end is as easy as putting some html files on an ftp (which you shouldn’t do, of course). There is no need for a complicated setup or deployment process because it’s just some HTML served from nginx (or any other webserver). You can put the files on Amazon S3, your own host or github pages. And as it’s only static files being served, performance is as good as it gets.
Written by Sebastian on May 16, 2014 in general
Hello World!
I wanted to do this for a long time. Write a “Hello World” on a new blog. So here it is. Awesome! But this is not a normal “Hello world” trying to get my feet wet, this is a post on why one should avoid blogging plattforms like Blogspot, where my blog lived up until now.