Markus’s Brain Swap Space

This is Markus Zoeller’s blog about software development related topics.

Recent posts

  • Jan 16, 2022 - Command Hooks with the zsh Shell

    This post shows a small example how command hooks of the zsh shell can be used to print timestamps before and after a command execution. This can be helpful in postmortems of operations when it can be important to know exactly when you’ve seen a specific output or how long a command took.

  • May 25, 2018 - Elastic Stack (formerly ELK) - Kibana (part 1)

    Kibana is the web UI to visualize data in the data store called Elasticsearch. It’s the user facing component in the Elastic Stack, formerly called ELK stack. This post is based on previous posts which show the basics of Logstash and Elasticsearch and will talk about a few ways how Kibana can help you make sense out of your logs.

  • May 11, 2018 - The 2018 KubeCon and CloudNativeCon in Copenhagen, Denmark

    This post is my recap of the KubeCon and CloudNativeCon conference which took place in Copenhagen (Denmark) from May 1-4, 2018. I’ll go briefly through the sessions I attended and the notes I took.

  • Apr 27, 2018 - Ubuntu with Debian Sid APT repository

    Ubuntu is great in my opinion, and of the reasons for it is its use of recent versions for the packages in their APT repositories. But what if you need a package in an even more recent version and cannot wait for the next release? The Debian Sid release, the unstable development version, has those newer packages and they can be used in an Ubuntu with the help of APT package pinning and this post shows the things you need to know for that.

  • Apr 13, 2018 - Learning Go (part 1) - Conway’s Game of Life

    The Go programming language is currently fashionable, and it’s been four years since the last time I started to learn a new programming language (Python), so I decided to start a series about my learning attempts. As I also want to know more about Kubernetes, my goal is to learn enough Go in the next few months to read the Kubernetes code base comfortably. As a starting point for this multi-part series, I’ve chosen Conway’s Game of Life [1], because its rules are simple but more complex than a typical hello world example.

  • Mar 30, 2018 - Quick Tip: Ansible target hosts with wildcard

    This is a short quick tip about Ansible. TL;DR: it’s possible to use a wildcard in the target hosts specifier. This became useful to me when I dynamically created the inventory based on Ansible facts.

  • Mar 16, 2018 - HTML5 slides with Reveal.js, Markdown and Docker

    Presentation slides. They can be a great tool for communicating ideas to others. I was looking for a way to create slide decks where I can specify the content as plain text and have it separate to the rendering. I’m sure this is somehow possible with PowerPoint or OpenOffice, but I didn’t bother to look for it. This post shows how I specify the content in a Markdown file and let it render by Reveal.js which I packed into a Docker image.

  • Mar 02, 2018 - Elastic Stack (formerly ELK) - Logstash (Part 2)

    This is a follow-up to the previous post Elastic Stack (formerly ELK) - Logstash (Part 1). We continue were we left of the last time, and dive right into it. No intro, no explanation of concepts or terms, only configuration of Logstash pipelines.

Older posts can be found in the archive.