Feb 9, 2019
Feb 9, 2019

Travelling for Work, with Kids at Home

I began travelling for my job when my first child was three months old. But don’t mistake correlation for causation…it wasn’t the broken nights' sleep that forced me onto the road, but an excellent job opportunity that seemed worth the risk. Nearly eight years later and I’m in a different job but still with a bunch of travel involved. How much I travel has varied. It’s tended to average around 30%, but has peaked at way more than that.
Jan 29, 2019
Jan 29, 2019

Kafka Connect Change Log Level and Write Log to File

By default Kafka Connect sends its output to stdout, so you’ll see it on the console, Docker logs, or wherever. Sometimes you might want to route it to file, and you can do this by reconfiguring log4j. You can also change the configuration to get more (or less) detail in the logs by changing the log level. Finding the log configuration file The configuration file is called connect-log4j.properties and usually found in etc/kafka/connect-log4j.
Jan 21, 2019
Jan 21, 2019

Replacing UTF8 non-breaking-space with bash/sed on the Mac

A script I’d batch-run on my Markdown files had inserted a UTF-8 non-breaking-space between Markdown heading indicator and the text, which meant that # My title actually got rendered as that, instead of an H3 title.

Looking at the file contents, I could see it wasn’t just a space between the # and the text, but a non-breaking space.

Jan 9, 2019
Jan 9, 2019

What to Do When Docker on the Mac Runs Out of Space

I use Docker and Docker Compose a lot. Like, every day. It’s a fantastic way to build repeatable demos and examples, that can be torn down and spun up in a repeatable way. But…what happens when the demo that was working is spun up and then tail spins down in a blaze of flames?

Dec 19, 2018
Dec 19, 2018

Quick Thoughts on Not Writing a Crap Abstract

I’ve reviewed a bunch of abstracts in the last couple of days, here are some common suggestions I made: No need to include your company name in the abstract text. Chances are I’ve not heard of your company, and even if I have, what does it add to my comprehension of your abstract and what you’re going to talk about? Possible exception would be the "hot" tech companies where people will see a talk just because it’s Netflix etc
Dec 17, 2018
Dec 17, 2018

Moving from Ghost to Hugo

Why? I’ve been blogging for quite a few years now, starting on Blogger, soon onto WordPress, and then to Ghost a couple of years ago. Blogger was fairly lame, WP yucky, but I really do like Ghost. It’s simple and powerful and was perfect for my needs. My needs being, an outlet for technical content that respected formatting, worked with a markup language (Markdown), and didn’t f**k things up in the way that WP often would in its WYSIWYG handling of content.
Dec 17, 2018
Dec 17, 2018

Pull new version of multiple Docker images

Tiny little snippet this one. Given a list of images:

$ docker images|grep confluent
confluentinc/cp-enterprise-kafka                5.0.0               d0c5528d7f99        3 months ago        600MB
confluentinc/cp-kafka                           5.0.0               373a4e31e02e        3 months ago        558MB
confluentinc/cp-zookeeper                       5.0.0               3cab14034c43        3 months ago        558MB
confluentinc/cp-ksql-server                     5.0.0               691bc3c1991f        4 months ago        493MB
confluentinc/cp-ksql-cli                        5.0.0               e521f3e787d6        4 months ago        488MB
…

Now there’s a new version available, and you want to pull down all the latest ones for it:

docker images|grep "^confluentinc"|awk '{print $1}'|xargs -Ifoo docker pull foo:5.1.0