After a long time of using Python & Flask as the base for my site, I’ve switched over to Hugo. My site doesn’t change very often, so this move makes a lot of sense. It’s easier to host and no more Python updates to keep up with.

The move was pretty easy. I created a new Hugo project and copied all my static resources from the old site to the /static directory of my Hugo project. Then I took my Python Jinja2 templates layout and used it for the base of my default layout in Hugo (i.e. baseof.html). I was then able to add content for the pages of my site, and lastly copy over the posts that I wanted to keep.

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I recently got the opportunity to talk with the amazing Josh Long on his podcast, Bootiful Podcast. It was a great time and a fun conversation. We started from the beginning and talked about all things containers, Docker, Buildpacks, Paketo, and of course, Spring & Native Images.

If you’re new to buildpacks or looking to give them a test run, this is a great place to start. We covered a lot of the concepts and questions people frequently ask. It was also great to talk about some of the improvements that we’ve recently added into the Java buildpacks. For example, we recently added support for UPX compression of native images and the ability to use Tilt with buildpacks for microservice development.

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I have over the years done a lot of work with buildpacks. Both on Cloud Foundry and now with Cloud Native Buildpacks. This year I’ve been fortunate enough to start a job at VMware working on them full time, which I’m pretty excited about.

I am primarily working to develop the Java-related Paketo buildpacks, as well as contribute to the Buildpacks project & to also maintain the Java Cloud Foundry buildpack.

To support this effort, I’m going to try and start writing more about these efforts. What’s new, what’s cool and more about how to use buildpacks.

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It’s been a little while since I’ve posted an update on the PHP Cloud Native Buildpacks. The good news is that lots of progress has been made. We’ve basically achieved feature parity with the old PHP buildpack and I believe the PHP CNB’s should be working for most apps now!

If you’re coming from the old PHP buildpack, there are some differences. This is basically a major version bump, so it was an opportunity to make a few breaking changes that we believe will generally improve the user experience. Check out the migration documentation for details on what’s changed.

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In my previous post, I talked about how to use the PHP Cloud Native buildpacks. It was not super tricky but required some manual work to set up. This is because the PHP CNBs were not, at the time, part of an official builder.

What’s a builder? It’s basically an image containing a bunch of CNBs, all ready for your use. See this link for more details.

If you are to run pack suggest-builders, then you will see the list of official builders. At the time of writing, that is Heroku, Cloud Foundry (bionic) and Cloud Foundry (cflinuxfs3).

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At work, I’ve been helping to rewrite the PHP buildpack as a set of Cloud Native Buildpacks. The PHP CNBs are coming together, current quality is alpha, but I think they’re ready enough for people to try them out and report how they work for you. This post has instructions and a demo to use the PHP CNBs.

But first, a slight digression.

A little about the architecture of the PHP CNBs. The previous PHP buildpack has been decomposed into a set of five PHP CNBs, two of which are optional. There are php-cnb, php-composer-cnb, httpd-cnb, nginx-cnb and php-web-cnb.

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I’d previously written an article on deploying WordPress on Cloud Foundry. The process was a little clunky and has since broken, because of updates & changes to Cloud Foundry. To remedy this, I wrote a new post which was published today on the Cloud Foundry Foundation Blog.

Here’s the link -> https://www.cloudfoundry.org/blog/install-scale-wordpress-cloud-foundry-2018/

I recently found some time to finish up a project I started a long time ago. It’s a simple implementation of the “Simon Says” game in Javascript, jQuery, HTML5 and CSS3. The code ended up being pretty simple and it was a fun side project.

I’ve got a demo of it here.

Source code is on Github.

I’ve pushed out a few changes to the site and moved it to run on Pivotal Web Services.

If you’re unaware PWS is a hosted version of Cloud Foundry that’s run by Pivotal, my employer. It’s a great place to run apps of all sizes. Find out more info here.

I’ve pushed out some small updates to the site, plus some larger technical changes.

My first change was to move from web.py to Flask. The main reason for this was to make use of Flask FlatPages to store my posts (rather than a DB). Being that this is a small and simple site, it made my life easier to just store site data in a flat file rather than in a database.

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Welcome to the new site!

I think the last time I did a major upgrade on my site was sometime in 2004. That’s simply way too long!

As part of the update, I’ve done a complete redesign, using a nice template from freecsstemplate.org, adding some jQuery and some of my original photography. In addition, I’ve moved the hosting to Google’s AppEngine for hopefully improved reliability.

For the long time visitors, I’ve tried to preserve the link structure of my previous site, automatically redirecting you to the new links.

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