I often think Hashicorp could do a better job at establishing good patterns for creating identical environments from a single source of truth with terraform and terraform cloud. This is my take on building a really solid infrastructure continuous deployment setup with terraform and terraform cloud. Here is what I want to achieve: full end-to-end automation. After a pull request is merged no human interaction should be required to promote changes to all environments. Read more

I was looking for a nice IDE integrated on-chip debugging setup for STM32 chips and the STLink V3 on macOS. Neither OpenOCD nor st-util worked out of the box with CLion. I didn’t want to use gdb directly. STCubeIDE works great, but I don’t want to use STCubeMX projects. I’m writing firmware using chibios right now. I wanted something which works for any RTOS without much hastle. So I took some inspiration from how STCubeIDE works. Read more

Working on electronics makes me appreciate how easy software engineering is. Why is that? Personally I can work efficiently when I have a tight feedback loop and when I can simulate the environment I’m working in. This allows me to make small changes and quickly converge my design towards the desired state I want to reach. With electronics establishing a tight feedback loop is much more complicated. Assuming you layed down your schematic, sanity checked all nets and verified your PCB with design rule checks you eventually end up ordering a PCB. Read more

My Ganymede keyboard went through three big revisions in 2019 and I learned a lot from each of those. This is my personal retrospective of the mechnical keyboard I created, and where I want to take it next. First, I learned that I really prefer thin keyboards. The height of the Ganymede has slowly dropped between the revisions, and each revision I enjoyed typing on more. Revision 1 was the most high version because of the wooden case I cut myself we’re talking about 25mm to 30mm. Read more

I’ve spent some time learning the pony programming language on the side and I thought it would be fun to write a small command line game using it. The result is published on github. Tic Tac Toe is a nice example because it can be used to understand most primitives of the language and learn about the standard library along the way, side stepping most dependencies and build issues for now. Read more

Today I published the first batch of PCBs on Github which I designed while working on the Ganymede. These breakout board PCBs helped me as a novice in electronics with the development of my split keyboard. Included in this batch are: a breakout board for choc switches. It’s a 2x2 column-to-row matrix, with sockets for hot swapping. This is very useful for debugging one other breakout boards as it’s easy to connect some buttons. Read more

When I started working on my own ARM based, split ergonomic keyboard I decided to call it “Kepler”. I posted about this on keebtalk and users dexie@ and wilba@ were kind enough to point out that there’s already another keyboard called Kepler. So I decided to rename the Kepler to Ganymede. I’ve updated the Github repository accordingly.

In March 2018 I started out my ergonomic keyboard journey with an Ergodox EZ. There are many good things which can be said about the Ergodox EZ. It is a very reliable keyboard. It’s super easy to customize using the EZs web-based editor and updating it with teensy works great. The reason I started looking at alternative keyboards was because my hands are a little too small to use it efficiently. Read more

I bought two ErgoDox EZ keyboards and then spent more time & money to bring them to feature parity. Here’s why and how. Background In March 2018 I got my first Ergodox EZ and started to learn how to type on a split keyboard. In order to reach fluency faster I carried my ErgoDox EZ to work and back every day. This way I could type on it all the time. Read more

The upcoming release of Scaleway 1.3.0 will contain two new resources which will allow you to better utilize your Scaleway account. Specifically, you can now use terraform to create additional scaleway api tokens, as well as manage server user data. Let’s take a look. First, you might want to create additional API tokens to be used by applications interacting with the Scaleway API. Now you can create new tokens like this: Read more