Tech watch

Fri, 01 Nov 2024 22:56:48 +0000

Why tech watch matters

As a DevOps engineer, keeping a tech watch is a crucial practice: it keeps you up to date and lets you constantly follow the arrival of new tools in a field that never stops evolving.

There are several reasons for this. First, as a DevOps engineer, you constantly have to find ways to improve the CI/CD pipelines and the various processes in place in a company, so looking for new tools, new versions or new technologies is essential.

Then, in my case, this watch lets me be a source of proposals and a driving force in my environment, by bringing my knowledge of recent topics.

Tech watch tools

The tools used for the watch are the key: they are what makes it quick and efficient to manage. So you need to re-evaluate these tools periodically, so that they do not become obsolete and still fit the need.

Which means you also need to keep a watch on your watch tools!

Feeder

After using feedly daily for a while, I was not convinced by the app, I needed a simpler and cleaner tool.

After some research, I came across Feeder, an open source RSS reader and aggregator available on Android. The app does not require logging in with an account and it runs locally, which keeps my data private.

The design of the app is very simple and clean, and its configuration has the same qualities. Feeder also lets you save articles, add them to favourites or even back up your configuration. These are very handy features, and necessary for a tool of this kind.

Feeder interface

Feeder lets me fetch the articles from my main IT sites, listed in the next section, and read them from the app. For example, I can use my commuting time to do my watch every day.

I sort the RSS feeds into different categories according to their field:

DevOps
Linux
General IT
Cybersecurity

Wiki

Once I have gathered information from my various sources, I sort it to keep only what I find interesting and/or useful. Once sorted, I format the items I kept and put them into my wiki. (I actually wrote an article on building this wiki.)

This gives a clean and condensed result, so I can find what interests me in no time, which is the whole point of the watch for me.

Sources of information

I use several sources of information, but I find that the article / post format is the best, the one that suits me most. Written content is often straight to the point, which is not always the case with a video or a podcast, so this format is efficient and concise.

Most of the sources below are in French, I marked the English ones with 🇬🇧.

Websites

Blogs
- Stéphane Robert: DevOps
- Une tasse de café - Quentin Joly: DevOps
- IT Connect: Sysadmin / General IT
- Korben: General IT
- 🇬🇧 It’s foss: Linux
RSS aggregators
- Journal du hacker: General IT
- 🇬🇧 Hacker News: General IT

YouTube channels

Xavki: DevOps
Yves Rougy: Linux
Underscore: General IT / Cybersecurity
Devoxx: DevOps / Linux
🇬🇧 NetworkChuck: Cybersecurity

Community

The community feeds below are mainly English-speaking communities.

Medium

Conclusion

To conclude, I find that the watch lets me learn something every day in a field of IT. It is a kind of continuous improvement process at a human scale, and it keeps me from stagnating and helps my skills grow.

Personally, I also like to put my discoveries into practice through a POC in my homelab, to quickly form an opinion on the subject.

Building a personal wiki

Sun, 06 Oct 2024 22:56:48 +0000

Introduction

With the amount of information coming my way every day across many fields, handwritten notes scattered everywhere and never reused, and the recurring hassle of solving a problem for the umpteenth time without remembering the solution, just like every time before. 😆

I was missing a tool to act as a second brain 🧠, so that all these notes and already solved errors would be gathered in one place.

The need was therefore there, with mandatory requirements that took shape over the various tests:

Quick to access
Pages written in Markdown
Lightweight tool
Hosted locally

What is MkDocs?

MkDocs is a fast, simple static site generator geared towards building project documentation. Documentation source files are written in Markdown, and configured with a single YAML configuration file.

This definition from the MkDocs website appealed to me as soon as I came across it, because it met the 4 needs listed above, so I decided to give this tool a try.

MkDocs site

The first version of my wiki used this tool. I used a Dockerfile to containerise the tool and use it locally without installing the mkdocs Python package.

The only downside of this tool is that the user interface is a bit hard on the eyes. That is what motivated me to find a theme!

Material

Material is a framework used on top of MkDocs that generates a static site customisable through a multitude of options, with the ability to add plugins as well.

It gives a very clean result while keeping configuration to a minimum, because many features are already built into the framework and a single line in the configuration file is enough to enable them.

MkDocs example with Material

Setting up the wiki

To set up this tool, the Material documentation explains how to deploy it with the mkdocs utility or with a docker container. I went for the docker option, so that I can use this container in my different environments without needing the utility on all my machines.

First, you initialise the project to create the skeleton of the wiki. To do this, you pass the new . command to the docker container, which already has the mkdocs utility as its entrypoint.

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docker run --rm -it -v ${PWD}:/docs squidfunk/mkdocs-material new .

Once the project is initialised, you end up with the following tree:

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.
├─ docs/
│ └─ index.md
└─ mkdocs.yml

docs: the tree of the wiki
mkdocs.yaml: the wiki configuration file

Configuration

The wiki is configured through the mkdocs.yaml file at the root of the project. This is where you set the theme and the features you want, listed in the Material configuration documentation, as well as the Python extensions you want to use.

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# Configuration du site
site_name: My site
site_url: https://mydomain.org/mysite

# Configuration du thème material
theme:
 name: material
 icon:
 repo: fontawesome/brands/gitlab
 logo: assets/logo.png
 # Ajout de features
 features:
 - content.code.copy
 - navigation.instant
 - navigation.tabs
 - navigation.tabs.sticky
 - navigation.sections
 - navigation.path
 - navigation.top
 # Automatic light & dark mode
 palette:
 # Palette toggle for automatic mode
 - media: "(prefers-color-scheme)"
 toggle:
 icon: material/brightness-auto
 name: Switch to light mode

 # Palette toggle for light mode
 - media: "(prefers-color-scheme: light)"
 scheme: default
 toggle:
 icon: material/brightness-7
 name: Switch to dark mode

 # Palette toggle for dark mode
 - media: "(prefers-color-scheme: dark)"
 scheme: slate
 toggle:
 icon: material/brightness-4
 name: Switch to system preference
# Déclaration des plugins du thème material
plugins:
 - search

# Extension python pour le markdown
markdown_extensions:
 - pymdownx.superfences:
 custom_fences:
 - name: mermaid
 class: mermaid
 format: !!python/name:pymdownx.superfences.fence_code_format
 - admonition
 - pymdownx.details
 - pymdownx.superfences
 - attr_list
 - pymdownx.emoji:
 emoji_index: !!python/name:material.extensions.emoji.twemoji
 emoji_generator: !!python/name:material.extensions.emoji.to_svg

In my case, I added several features, for example to copy code blocks, to have tabs per section name, or to choose between light and dark mode. I added the search plugin to get a search bar in my wiki.

I added Python extensions to use emojis and mermaid diagrams, and to add HTML/CSS classes to my Markdown blocks.

Adding content

The content lives under the docs/ directory: each folder is a section and each file is a page.

You can build a very modular structure with N sections, N sub-sections and N files per sub-section, or only create files. It leaves free rein to your imagination.

The folder name is the name of the section or sub-section, and for pages, the title is the file name, or the Markdown header (# Title1) if there is one.

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docs/
├── assets
│ └── logo.png
├── Plantes
│ ├── ficus.jpg
│ └── Ficus.md
└── Tech
 ├── Git
 │ └── config.md
 └── Golang
 └── issues.md

Deployment

For the deployment, I run this project locally in a docker container with the docker-compose.yml file, since I have no interest in hosting it on the web for now.

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services:
 mkdocs-material:
 restart: "always"
 ports:
 - "8000:8000"
 container_name: "wiki"
 volumes:
 - "/path/to/wiki:/docs"
 image: "squidfunk/mkdocs-material"

Conclusion

I think adding this wiki to my toolbox will be more and more useful over time. All the knowledge I gather will be in one place, sorted by field. This gives me easy and quick access to information, which increases my productivity and reduces the time I waste.

Knowledge-Management on Matteo ZINUTTI

Tech watch

Why tech watch matters

Tech watch tools

Feeder

Feeder interface

Wiki

Sources of information

Websites

YouTube channels

Community

Medium

Reddit

Conclusion

Building a personal wiki

Introduction

What is MkDocs?

MkDocs site

Material

MkDocs example with Material

Setting up the wiki

Configuration

Adding content

Deployment

Conclusion