January this year was a good month, the truth is that coming back to work after taking time off is always difficult. However I still believe January 2017 was productive, both personally and professionally.

Professionally

I was able to spend a significant amount of time Dockerizing some of our Ruby (and Ruby on Rails) applications. My personal goal was to:

1. Prepare automated Docker images to be built during CI for our QA to verify, I used templenv and the Gitlab API to connect everything. It was a success.
2. Have a Docker-based development environment. It sort of worked, but I will not call it a success.

Sadly having a Docker-based development environment on Mac is currently a painful experience, specially because of the following two bugs:

• File access in mounted volumes extremely slow this is the blocker issue to me, because not having shared volumes means not having a clean way to share your changes with your container. There are workarounds like d4m-nfs, but still it’s annoying:

https://t.co/r6cVihhGge pic.twitter.com/sPoor7Avfp

— Mario Carrion (@mariocarrion) January 6, 2017

• Docker.qcow2 never shrinks - disk space usage leak in docker for mac, not a real blocker, unless you forget to remove the file from time to time; also it seems to be sort of fixed in the most recent version, so it’s getting better.

Surprisingly, I tried our generated docker-compose.yml files on Windows, and it worked even better! Microsoft Windows did not disappoint this time.

Let's play with Docker on Windows for a bit pic.twitter.com/pcsHrIGRjX

— Mario Carrion (@mariocarrion) February 1, 2017

Besides that I was able to research a bit about writing shared libraries in Go for loading them in Ruby (with FFI), for some our compute-intensive tasks; R&D worked nicely, I just need to actually write the legit version of this, make sure memory is freed accordingly and profit.

Personally

I was able to finish reading four books:

1. Ruby Performance Optimization
2. Monitoring Docker
3. Getting Started with Kubernetes
4. Docker Networking Cookbook

And I’m currently reading my first Internet of things book called Building the Web of Things, also I got a haircut:

I got a haircut therefore I need a new gopher pic.twitter.com/xgafvqcOP4

— Mario Carrion (@mariocarrion) February 1, 2017

What am I planning for February 2017?

Finish reading Building the Web of Things and at least 3 more books, I’m planning to finish the other two books I mentioned in my previous post: Go Design Patterns and Go Programming Blueprints - Second Edition, as well as my first AWS Lambda book, surprisingly titled: AWS Lambda in Action.

I will be updating templenv to add a new function to be used in the templates, and blog more often about technical stuff, I have a few drafts already waiting to be published. Good times.

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