Tools on vnykmshr

Git history with Gource

Sat, 07 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0000

I’d been watching YouTube videos of Gource visualizations – Git, Homebrew, Node.js. Each commit becomes a moment in time, files branch out like a digital organism, contributors appear and disappear. Months of development condensed into a few minutes of organic growth.

I pointed it at my blog’s git repository. Here’s what came out.

Setup

On macOS, Homebrew handles everything:

brew update
brew install gource ffmpeg

The command that generates a video from a git repo:

Zero-downtime deploys

Mon, 15 Jul 2013 00:00:00 +0000

I deploy everything from the terminal. No web interface, no CI service, no dashboard with green buttons. Just deploy production from my laptop, and the code goes live.

The setup is two pieces. A bash script that handles the remote work – SSH in, pull the latest code, run hooks. And a Node.js process that watches a file on the server and reloads the app cluster when the file changes. Between them, they do zero-downtime deploys in under ten seconds.

Starting over

Tue, 05 Feb 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Every now and then you want to start over. This blog was long overdue for it. Feels good to tear it down and rebuild.

The old setup was WordPress on NearlyFreeSpeech.net. NFSN deserves credit – their pay-as-you-go model is honest and the value is real. But WordPress started feeling like a constraint. I spend my days building custom solutions. Using a one-size-fits-all CMS for my own site felt wrong.

So I built a blog engine.