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It’s been over half a year since I started using Nix, and I feel the time has come to look back and reflect on the experience. Interestingly, I didn’t start using it as a fancy dotfiles/devenv manager; in fact, that only came later as a side effect (pun intended!). I had a retrogaming Raspberry Pi 4 for some time, running Raspbian with RetroPie...

I finally found some time to work on mixxx-launchpad, my Novation Launchpad mappings for the popular Mixxx DJ software, which I started back in 2017. The current spike was mostly driven by the desire to add some long awaited features such supporting RGB LEDs and samplers. Additionally I wanted to modernize and componentize the code and make it e...

GitOps is a way of implementing Continuous Deployment for cloud native applications. Making git the single source of truth for cluster state has many benefits. Without completeness: offers observability and time-travel with the full change history recorded, enables modifying the application’s configuration and source code with a unified ap...

More than two years have elapsed since my last technical update on LDBC SNB Datagen, in which I discussed the reasons for moving the code to Apache Spark from the MapReduce-based Apache Hadoop implementation and the challenges I faced during the migration. Since then, we reached several goals such as we refactored the serializers to use Spark’s...

Podman is a daemonless container engine for developing, managing, and running OCI containers on your Linux System. With podman, containers can either be run as root or in rootless mode, which improves security as an attacker will not have root privileges over your system. It has a CLI that serves as a drop-in replacement for Docker to make migra...

Introduction I was recently involved in projects that had to work on multiple Spark versions. One of them is an open-source project that targeted Spark 2 and Spark 3 for a while; the other one a collection of internal ETL applications that the team migrated to Spark 3 but also had to support Spark 2 for a longer period of time due to external c...

Building applications in containers has well-known benefits. Encapsulating the whole build environment in a container removes the possibly lenghty and hardly reproducible process of setting up the build environment; while the smart use of build stages and layers opens up opportunities for caching and parallelism. For builds that consist of seve...