Code 🐛

As mentioned in a previous post, I recently finished writing the second edition of Learn Ansible. This had me using Python a lot, and my one key takeaway is that managing Python has become a massive chore. Now, with the book complete, I thought I would strip back on my machine, start from scratch - or as close to clean as I could get - and develop a cleaner, more streamlined way of managing Python on my local machine....

I decided to spring clean my Dotfiles repo external link , as it had been a while. Then I noticed that the last time I mentioned them on the blog was nearly ten years ago, so I wanted to give a quick update. The most significant change is that I have moved to using Zsh external link and Oh My Zsh external link since Zsh became the default Shell in macOS....

During the day job, I have to get a little creative with controlling costs for Azure resources; there are some everyday tasks and scenarios where Azure Logic Apps can help you save money 💰. The first is quite a typical scenario: stopping and starting Azure Virtual Machines. There was a time when I would have just used an Azure Automation Account and the Microsoft-supplied workflow. Still, Automation Accounts are a little (well, a lot) too reliant on PowerShell for my macOS using / Linux administrating tastes....

As I am coming to the end of writing the second edition of Lean Ansible (more news on that coming soon), I thought now would be a great time to have a look at what exciting developments have been happening in the six months now that I have a little more free time. One of the things I have been keeping an eye on is the state of Large Language Models (LLM for short), especially since the introduction of open-source models such as Llama from Meta external link and Mistral 7B external link , which you can run locally....

I had some time, so I thought I would take a look at Aider Chat external link , Aidir Chat is described by its authors as; aider is a command-line chat tool that allows you to write and edit code with OpenAI’s GPT models. You can ask GPT to help you start a new project, or modify code in your existing git repo. Aider makes it easy to git commit, diff & undo changes proposed by GPT without copy/pasting....

Since the last post about the blog I have been playing with the blog a bit more, I have finally got a decent PageSpeed Insights Score external link ; It’s annoying that the Disqus javascript is keeping me from getting 100/100 but considering before I started to tweak things I was getting a score of 85/100 so I can’t complain too much. I have also adding the following functionality to my Gruntfile external link grunt test — Runs a PageSpeed Insight test from the command line and highlights if either the mobile or desktop test drops below 95/100 grunt grab — Grabs the external Javascript needed to run the site so I can serve it locally....

As you may have noticed, the blog looks different (again). This is because I have moved from Wordpress external link back to Ghost external link using their GhostPro external link offering. One of the things I like about Ghost is the default theme, Casper external link . While I wanted to keep it there were a few things I wanted to tweak, such as removing the full page header image on main index....

At the end of my last post about Grunt I mentioned that I will be adding code to concatenate the javascript, compress the images and also tidy the code up abit. I have now done this …. Javascript I moved all of the javascript to a folder called _js and then set up the following …. js: { src: [ ‘_js/jquery.min.js’, ‘_js/jquery.plugin.min.js’, ‘js/bootstrap.min.js’, ‘_js/jquery.flexslider-min.js’, ‘_js/smooth-scroll.min.js’,’ _js/skrollr.min.js’, ‘_js/twitterFetcher_v10_min.js’, ‘_js/spectragram.min.js’, ‘_js/scrollReveal.min.js’, ‘_js/isotope.min.js’, ‘_js/lightbox....