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Thoughts, tech notes, in-depth articles and walkthroughs.

October 20, 2016 2 mins read
Engineering

Update CrashPlan on a QNAP NAS with Docker

Some time ago I installed Crashplan on my QNAP NAS with Docker. As in the meantime there were a lot of updates available for all moving parts, it was certainly time to update. What a scary idea! Much to my delight, the update went very smooth and CrashPlan works properly as expected. The update involved some steps, but with the Docker setup in place, the update was really easy. Update Procedure The steps I took to update Crashplan are the following:

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September 23, 2016 3 mins read
Engineering

Regression Testing a Sitemap

I was recently restructuring my website and was worried that my changes might break some of the links. Placing some 301 Redirects is fine as long as you track down all the links that change. And to track down which links changed is super easy: what better option would there have been than to write a regression test? In fact, thats the primary reason we write regression tests for - to make sure things don’t break upon change!

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August 13, 2016 6 mins read
Architecture

Domain Driven Design with Symfony: A Folder Structure

Deciding how to setup the directory structure of a project is not easy. Often, the frameworks people are used to suggest a way to organize classes, such as Symfony does. However, when implementing domain-driven design (DDD) it is very important to NOT couple the domain code to a framework, as sooner or later sticking to a proposed directory structure renders your carefully crafted code coupled to the framework. Also, you want to make sure that your architecture remains changeable.

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July 31, 2016 4 mins read
Engineering Cloud

Blue-Green Deployment with CloudFoundry

Blue-green deployments are a powerful technique to achieve zero-downtime deployments. With the CloudFoundry CLI, it is super easy to execute a blue-green deployment - even from a CI server. In a nutshell, a blue-green deployment spins up a whole new production environment with the new application version and once that is done, switches over the traffic from the old version to the new version. If you are unfamiliar with blue-green deployments be sure to read this article by Martin Fowler.

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