blog

Offering my blog to new authors

Regular readers of this blog know that I started it a long time ago, namely in April 2008. I soon found my cruising speed: a post a week. It requires time and discipline, but I achieved this goal during all those years. However, while I still have enough of both, I start to miss good post ideas. There are several reasons for this. I’ve always told that working on real-world projects is a vast source of ideas. Moving to Developer Advocacy, I’ve widened the list of topics I’m fa

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2022 in retrospective

2022 is over, and not a moment too soon. I’ll never forget it: some of my friends had to flee their own country; others are fighting for their freedom as I write this post. I hope they will be safe and that their wishes will come true in 2023. On the personal and technical side, here’s a summary of the past year from my perspective. Job change First and foremost, I changed jobs. I worked for Hazelcast for 3½ years. However, I started to become dissatisfied with the company

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Running Jekyll on a Mac

At the beginning of the year, I had two new Macs in a row in one month. I changed my company and had to return my previous laptop. Thus, I ordered a replacement one, but due to the current hardware shortage, the shipping took weeks: I had to rent one in the meanwhile. It means I had to install my Jekyll stack twice in a row. The first time took quite some time; the second one was much faster. In this post, I’d like to write it down once and for all to help other developers who want to d

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Advices on writing blog posts

At work, I’ve recently been asked to advise our engineers on how to write blog posts. A lot of such articles are already available. However, they tend to focus around two main themes: The technical publishing platform e.g. Jekyll, Medium, etc.Metrics e.g. readability score, SEO, etc. Beyond that, everyone is on one’s own. But I believe that writing a good technical article is as much art as engineering. In this post, I’d like to try to address this gap: I’ve been writi

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My blogging stack and publishing process

I know a lot of people who have interesting things to say: when I can, I try to encourage them to write their own blogs. I think every developer who has interest should do it, with the minimal hurdle possible. However, for reasons I cannot fathom, Medium has become the blogging platform of choice. Let’s face it, while the platform is okay-ish for non-technical posts, it’s not adapted for subjects that involve code - and formatting.

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Running your domain on HTTPS for free

This blog runs on HTTP for a long time as there is no transaction taking place so no security is needed (I use SFTP for file transfer). However, since Google’s latest search algorithm change, I’ve noticed a sharp decrease in the number of monthly visits, from more than 20k to around 13k. While my goal has never been to have the highest number of visits, it’s still good feedback to me (as well as a nice warm feeling). As it seems turning on HTTPS didn’t seem like a big de

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Drupal 7 to Jekyll, an epic journey

There’s a recent trend in blogging that consists of dropping PHP platforms such as WordPress and Drupal in factor of static HTML pages generated when needed. Static blogs have many advantages over PHP engines: They’re much faster since there’s no computation overhead at runtime for composing the rendered pageThere’s no security issues regarding SQL injectionFinally, generating the site removes the need for a staging area with possibly mismatched configurations morevaad