Recent content in Posts on Matt Brunt - Developer & Problem Solver
I’ve used Google Workspace for email on my own domain for years. I used it because it was easy, and I’d used Gmail for years on a non-custom domain. Given the growing geopolitical tensions and privacy concerns with things hosted in the US, I’m moving to a new provider. I thought I’d brain-dump my experience with moving to a new provider. It’s not an exhaustive guide…
I was tagged to complete this challenge (modern day chain-letter?) by Sally Lait . I haven’t posted in a while and I write blog posts often, so it was a nice excuse to sit and think about some of the questions. Why did you start blogging in the first place? World of Warcraft played a big part. Back then I was heavily into the game and made a number of friends from it, some of whom I still…
I’ve been through a few ‘phases’ of a workflow for storing, editing, and backing up photos I take. Let’s explore what I used to do, and how that’s evolved into what I do now to overcome the various pain-points I’ve encountered along the way. Let’s detail the high-level progression of what I started out with. Phase 1: Photos on my desktop computer Phase 2:…
I’m a hobby photographer. It’s something I enjoy. I recently bought myself a new mirrorless camera and figured I’d post about the main bits of gear here. Camera Bodies Canon 7D I bought this off my Mum (along with a 17-55mm f/2.8 lens) a few years back and have enjoyed using it. DSLRs are nice but always felt bulky. I didn’t mind this being an APS-C crop sensor. It’s…
I got a new laptop (a refurbished MacBook Pro 14" with M2 Pro) and was setting up the little tools and pieces of software that just make using it nicer. So I figured I’d list a few of them here! One Thing Free Download / Info: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/one-thing/id1604176982?mt=12 This just gives you the ability to add some text to the menu bar on macOS. Add a reminder for the day, a…
My wife is also playing a new character in our D&D campaign, here’s her new backstory! Backstory Tegan Da’shar is a young shadow magic sorcerer on the run with her closest friend and companion, Varas. The illegitimate daughter of a minor noble in the Icewind Dales, her father Lord Da’shar fulfilled his obligation to Tegan’s mother by agreeing to have her educated and set up into a “career”…
I’m going to be playing a new character in a D&D campaign I’m in with some friends, I wrote the backstory to send to our Dungeon Master so I figured I’d post it here too as I’m pleased with it! Backstory Varas had a reputation as a bit of a rascal from a young age. He spent his formative years in Port Catamon, a bustling port city situated on the shores of the Sword Coast,…
Bee happy 🐝 Inspired by my friend Carol and her lifenotes :) ✨ Highlights Started my new job at 🐝 Bumble ! The people there are lovely, my new line manager is incredibly supportive, the codebase (and engineering team, and user base, and just… everything) is massive, but there’s lots of documentation and the pressure to get to grips with things and learn it all is purely from my own…
The Internet-of-Things sucks. But I like having data and control over parts of the house. So here’s the devices I use for that as I’m often asked what ones I use. These all communicate through Home Assistant so any WiFi devices don’t have access to the internet, and can only talk to Home Assistant or any other device I specify in VLANs and firewall rules on my router. A lot of…
I started monitoring my energy usage last year out of curiosity, but with how prices have risen this year, it feels less like a “this would be fun to know” situation and more of a “where are we using energy that we shouldn’t be” situation now. Update 1: This post only covers electricity usage, my gas monitoring is minimal and not what I’m focusing on for this…
I use Signal as my message app of choice. From the WhatsApp days of past, I kinda liked the weird-and-quirky icon backgrounds they had. No idea what’s on them, but it was visually pleasing. I got bored, so I made some backgrounds, originally with 4 colour ways and 4 opacities of the icons. All in 2160x3840 resolution. I used icons from Reshot with the free license . The colourways are on a…
I run 2 copies of AdGuard Home for ad-blocking on my local network. I didn’t want to have to duplicate settings across the 2 instances I run. I discovered adguardhome-sync which allows settings to be synchronised to replica instances. Neat! But I hit a problem with the instance I had running as a Home Assistant Addon . The instance I run as a replica is via a Home Assistant Addon and I…
Well well well, what do we have here? I work on a CTF platform. It’s called ranges.io and it’s fun. There’s 2 version of the answer to the question “so what does it do?” Tired: “It’s a question and answer platform” Wired: “It’s a platform that allows hackers to compete against each other to see who’s best” Now, I’m just…
I had a Netgear Orbi router and satellites running my home network, but things were becoming unstable. Constant dropouts, a router that thought the WAN port was down and required multiple reboots a day, it just wasn’t cutting it anymore. So, I decided to bite the bullet and go for the UniFi setup I’d been considering for a while. Here’s my initial impressions. Background &…
I’m moving from macOS to Windows for my work computer, while I use Windows personally with my gaming systems and have used Windows for years, on an average day I was using macOS more than Windows. There are things I wanted to improve about my Windows experience. Not only this, but I’ve also recently built a new desktop gaming PC and have also installed a lot of this software on there…
Having snagged a 3080 Ti for MSRP recently, I ended up building a new system completely, rather than just upgrading the GPU from my old system. It wasn’t bad, but I felt I could be pushing the GPU further then the 1st generation Ryzen 7 1800X that I was running before. I found some decent sales on both new and open-box hardware around the Black Friday / Cyber Monday period and took advantage…
Since Home Assistant announced energy monitoring was being added, I’ve been super interested in what sort of data I could get out of my energy system. We have nothing fancy here. Just fairly standard dual-fuel (electricity and gas) system provided by the grid with a smart meter. No solar panels or batteries or returning power to the grid. My provider (E.ON Next) don’t make that data…
I’ve recently started using some Tasmota plugs for power monitoring using Home Assistant , in setting them up I found (and was shown) some useful commands ! Using commands in Tasmota allows you to do and configure a whole range of things. I shan’t cover all of them, just the ones I’m using, mostly for my own blogumentation , but if these posts help someone else, cool.…
I’ve recently dived into MQTT . I got it working without really understanding some core concepts (yay easy-to-use UIs) but felt myself wanting to know more about what it was. I did some reading up on the various parts and decided to document them here for my own reference later on. Maybe it’ll be useful to others too, who knows! I’ve seen a number of people blogging their…
Time moves on. Posts do not. Sometimes (read: most of the time) an old post doesn’t get updated. The information in that post might be outdated and incorrect. But people don’t always consider the age of the post, just jump to the content. Taking inspiration from Twitter, I’ve added a message to be displayed on blog posts older than 365 days on here. Seeing a tweet about a message…
Previously my phone-photo-backup process involved connecting it to a computer, then manually copying photos to a folder on my NAS. This was inefficient, and I’d often forget to do it for months at a time. I wanted something that’d backup my photos automatically, and do so to my own hardware. I found PhotoSync to be an awesome app and setup PhotoPrism as a backup target for it to use.…
The past few weeks have been quite a ride. I’ve not had so many good things happen in such a short space of time before! With everything going on, I just felt the need to write this post as a journal of how things were, how things felt and to remind myself that things are going just about as well as they can be for me and my bubble right now. I’m grateful. April Wednesday 21st April I…
I’ve worked with code for a long time now, I’ve come to realise that every ‘simple’ request is only simple on the surface. As any system grows, so does the number of considerations that have to be made when implementing a new feature or change to existing functionality. Background: I work on a Capture-The-Flag (CTF) platform. Our system is used to deliver content, challenge…
I’d previously set up an If-This-Then-That (IFTTT) integration with Monzo to put 20p into a pot every time I tweet . I’d locked the pot until mid-November. Then the PS5 pre-orders opened, and the release date in the UK was November 19th, 2020. My pot would unlock just before this - neat! I set the pot and integration up in May, and decided I’d let it run for 6 months in a locked…
In part 1 of this series of blog posts about Home Assistant I got setup and created an automation. In this post I’ll cover what I use most on the mobile app and how I use notifications where relevant to my automations. When I started writing this series, I wrote the first post almost like a tutorial on how to set up Home Assistant and configure it, but I’ve realised that didn’t…
I’ve had various ‘smart’ devices in the house for a while, but they’re all separate systems that don’t talk to each other. I looked into systems to get everything talking to each other and Home Assistant is the one I chose to go with! This series of blog posts about Home Assistant will document and detail the setup I’m using, as well as linking to the devices,…
It’s been one month since I went #FullMonzo, I’m thinking of periodically writing posts on my findings both in my own spending habits, but also in how I’m using Monzo to better manage my money. Since going #FullMonzo at the end of January 2020, it’s been really eye-opening to easily be able to see what sort of things I spend my money on, as well as fun and helpful tinkering…
I recently wanted to be able to control whether a route was available based on an environment variable, in dev I wanted it available, but in production I wanted it turned off (for now). I like using feature flags and environment variables to toggle things on and off, and thought I’d write up how I did it here. To do this, we make use of a number of features in Symfony: Environment variables…
I’ve used Monzo for a number of years, but never as my primary account. I’ve used the Current Account Switch Service to move completely from my old bank account to Monzo - here’s what I’ve now got setup. Why? It was tricky having 2 separate current accounts. I tried to use one as my bills account, and one as my ‘spending money’ account. Trying to work out what…
I’ve been using a Bullet Journal for a few years now, what started off as something to try turned into something I rely on day to day. I thought I’d post an update on how I now use it. Back in March of 2017 I posted “A month of bullet journalling” , which detailed how I’d found it for the first month. A little later, I was asked to write a blog post for the Tech…
A couple of bits of software I have on my systems that once installed, I kinda forget they’re there, but they’re very useful Greenshot Link: https://getgreenshot.org I loved the screenshot capabilities of macOS. Capturing regions and windows and having them save to the desktop was great. With Windows, there’s the snipping tool, but it’s so many clicks to open the tool,…
As part of the DDD East Midlands speakers workshop we were asked to write a 3 minute talk on any subject of our choosing and we had to deliver it without slides. We had 30 minutes to prepare and so I chose to talk about Mr Edwin Hubble, my crested gecko! The care and handling of dragons Picture a tropical forest. Humid, warm, leaves rusting in an ever so slight breeze, insects chirping and flowers…
Docker volumes are fiddly and just don’t work out-of-the-box with WSL. Here’s how to fix that… When using the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL), Docker expects volume mounts to be in the format: /c/Users/brunty/code - however by default in WSL they’re in the format: /mnt/c/Users/brunty/code as WSL is configured to mount drives in /mnt Before Windows 10 1803 you’d…
For our project at work, we needed to set up Xdebug in Docker. Not only this, but we had different developers using different machines and operating systems, the IP of the host would need to be flexible for it to work for us all. Here’s how we did it. The goal We love ❤️ Xdebug . We wanted, no, we needed xdebug working on both Linux as well as macOS inside Docker (as these were the operating…
Getting things set up and rolling at my new job, the test setup and how to do some things was something I was especially interested in. Due to past experience with testing, I was asked to put thoughts, ideas and techniques together to help us kick things off ‘right’. I brought up the subject of contract testing and figured I’d write up my thoughts and notes on it. Pre-post…
My ‘old’ laptop was a Macbook Pro from late 2013. I’ve recently bought a new laptop and will be ditching macOS for personal development and using Windows. Why did I move? Let’s look at the hardware of what I bought, vs what I was considering if I went the MacBook Pro route. Here’s a list of pros and cons to each: Recoil II: CPU: i7 8750H RAM: 32GB 2400MHz DDR4 GPU:…
There’s been a couple of things recently that have got me to this point Hype around serverless functions My growing interest in OpenFaaS So here I am, sat in a coffee shop in central London tinkering with OpenFaaS and PHP - here’s how it went. OpenFaaS describes itself as “Serverless Functions Made Simple for Docker & Kubernetes” Within this post, I’m not saying any…
People often comment on how it must be so great to be able to travel to speak, educate others and have the time and support to do so. It is. I love it. But it’s more than they think it is. People: Travelling and giving talks must be great, all that time off work and relaxing! Me: 1:30pm: Leave work 2:00pm: Get train and eat random WHSmiths sandwich 5:00pm: Arrive at city where I’m…
Hack 24 time is upon us! This is my 4th Hack 24 and I’ll be live-blogging the experience of the weekend. Friday: Hack 24 Eve Friday 10:45pm Sat with my best friend working on levelling up D&D characters. NERDS UNITE. I’m like a kid at Christmas right now, HACK24 HYPE INTENSIFIES. Saturday: Hack 24 Day 1 Saturday 6:00am Alarm: BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP Me: SMASH Right,…
Packing light this year… The little thing in the middle is my iPad mount: The Mountie Plus from @TenOneDesign is so good. Stable and the lightning port pass through space is way nicer than the older model. Sweeeeet. pic.twitter.com/NOawdZQYkA — Matt Brunt (@Brunty) February 19, 2018 Laptop (Macbook Pro), iPad Pro (and Apple Pencil) Mouse (Logitech MX Master) Mount for iPad to laptop…
We’re looking for a rockstar ninja superhero programmer wizard who can save our failing company. This post is just poking fun at so many job adverts that ask so much, and tell you so little… Thanks to Adam and Hodgy for inspiration of some of the requirements
I’ve been using Kahlan for testing a bit recently, I really like the describe-it style. I had a project where I needed to write an SQLite implementation of a repository and I wanted to use Kahlan to test the implementation, here’s how I did it. Note: I’m considering extracting this out into a package, but it’s not much work to implement and I’m not sure how generic I…
Inspired by something I saw a friend write in Go, I’ve written a small smoke testing tool in PHP. Smoke testing is said to have come from a type of hardware testing. You plug in and turn on the device, if it did not catch fire or release that oh-so-annoying electronic smoke, then it is considered working. Edit: I’ve edited this post to reflect the new .cigar.json file changes that were…
When developing, sometimes you might find yourself repeating things within the same context. I generally try and follow a one, two, many system for a rule on when to stop just adding on to something and refactor / try an approach that makes it easy to scale. This isn’t just necessarily related to code, it could be processes you execute when performing a task. The Walpiri are a tribe that use…
Transformers can provide a lot of helpful utility in Behat, reducing the work required to get what you need within your step definitions. Say you have the following step in your .feature file: Then I should have 2 products in the basket Under the surface, you might have a step definition that looks like this: /** * @Then I should have :count product(s) in the basket */ public function…
When working with web pages in behat, you can use something such as Mink directly to drive the browser and navigate around the site. But with page objects, you can make things a little more re-usable, here’s how. Let’s say you had a product page, where you can click a button and add that product to the basket. You might have a feature file like so: Scenario: Buying a single product…
It’s been a month since I started bullet journalling - it’s been good for my motivation, keeping track of what I’ve got going on, as well as making me mindful of all the things I’m doing. A month ago, I learned about bullet journalling from “That podcast” with Beau and Dave - and it then further got endorsed by David McKay who had been doing it for a while. I…
Recently I’ve been using Dokku to deploy some of my side-projects, I wanted a simple deployment procedure that didn’t rely on complicated build systems, as these were just small apps that I needed to host somewhere easily. I’m using Dokku for that - so here’s some instructions for getting Symfony working with it. I’ll preface this post by saying this blog post has sat…
When giving talks, I’ll often give a demo, when asking if anyone has questions at the end of the talk, often I’ll be asked “what is your prompt and where can I get it?” The terminal application I use iTerm2 as my terminal of choice, with the following set up (these aren’t required for the prompt, but some people have been curious): The font I use is Hack and…
Hack 24 is here once again! I’ll be participating as a hacker, and live-blogging the experience of the weekend. Friday: Hack 24 Eve Friday 7:35pm Earlier on twitter I mentioned: Tempted to kind of live blog @HackTwentyFour tomorrow as the event goes along on https://t.co/GHQ475h9Jh — Matt Brunt 🐘 (@Brunty) March 17, 2017 Which was met with gifs of approval: Well, that does it,…