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2024

  • in Projects
  • 13 min read

Blog Relaunched

My blog has existed since 2011. The intent has always been to share knowledge I gained, whether this be for someone else, or just for my future self. From the beginning I used Wordpress which makes it quite easy to set up a blog. There are also tons of themes and plugins that you can install and use.

Writing (especially in public) is not super natural for me. Doing it in WordPress did not feel natural to me either. So for a while I was dredding to create new blog posts because it was too cumbersome for me multiple reasons.

Another difficulty was keeping WordPress up to date along with the plugins and any customizations to it. While it is fairly easy to customize CSS, JS, or the PHP code of themes and plugins, there is no easy way to keep those separate so that themes and plugins can be easily updated.

I switched to a containerized setup, putting as much as possible in a repository. This included customizations. My idea was that it would be easier to update themes and plugins and re-apply those customizations. In the end, it was still too much manual work, however. It's not as easy as merging a dependency update on your repository raised by Renovate (of which I am a huge fan) and automatically re-deploying.

A few years ago, I came across the amazing Material for MkDocs. It is a technical documentation theme for MkDocs with many great features. Documentation is written in Markdown and can be version controlled in a repository. This is basically "documentation as code".

I first introduced it at work a few years ago for various documentation sites. Together with Material for MkDocs this has been fantastic.

Since Material for MkDocs has a blog plugin I've been wanting to switch to this for a while. I knew that this will allow me to write blog posts more naturally (in a text editor) and treat everything as code. I finally got around to it and migrated my old WordPress site to what is now a static site.

It is live now 😄.

Keep reading if you are interested in the details of how it is set up.

  • in CI/CD
  • 4 min read

Linting Markdown files in GitLab CI

A while ago I was looking for a way to lint Markdown files and came across markdownlint in my search. There are two CLI tools for it, markdownlint-cli and markdownlint-cli2. Based on the comparison and rationale by one of the authors I gave markdownlint-cli2 a try first.

It is node-based and has lots of supported ways of invocation, such as a pre-commit hook, works well with the markdownlint vscode extension, and can be run as a container (including an image containing custom rules).

We are using GitLab which has code quality scanning support. You can import code quality results from a CI/CD job. Depending on the tier you have, you can see code quality findings in various places in the merge request UI helping the merge request author and reviewer(s). The code quality findings are provided as a JSON file during a CI/CD job. The report format is based on the CodeClimate report specification.

There was unfortunately no support for this yet. At first, I wrote a custom formatter that lived in our private repo. But instead of leaving it buried in a private repo, I wanted to make it available to all our own repositories and the markdownlint-cli2 community. I checked if there was appetite for integrating this into markdownlint-cli2 and ended up contributing a code quality formatter. It is published as an npm package: https://www.npmjs.com/package/markdownlint-cli2-formatter-codequality.

Open Sourced Toggle Headers Thunderbird extension

A long time ago I released the Toggle Headers extension for Thunderbird. I've kept it in a private git repository all this time (it might have started in a Subversion repository even).

This was way before I really got into open source. Recently, a member of the Thunderbirds Add-ons reviewer team sent in a fix and asked if I was willing to open source it to make contributions easier.

So I did open source it, and added a PR to fix compatibility with newer Thunderbird versions. I attributed this change to the reviewer who submitted the patch via email.

At the same time, it gave me a chance to create a script that allows me to build the add-on file. I had used ant before but given that it is only a ZIP file I wrote a small script in Python which makes it a lot easier to run.

Even though I don't use Thunderbird currently anymore, I find it important to keep maintaining the add-on. There are still a few users making use of it every day 😄