Recent content on Luc Perkins
I’ve done a whole lot of, err, stuff in software—plain old dev work, tech writing, DevRel, all and sundry “glue work”—but when pressed for a single designation for what I do I usually just say that I specialize in developer experience (or DevEx for short). While I have an intuitive sense of what DevEx is, I’ve often struggled to explain it, not just to friends and family…
There are lots of ways of creating Nix channels, but in this post I’d like to highlight the fastest and easiest way I’ve found thus far: via GitHub archives . I discovered this method when installing Home Manager . Nix channels are essentially tarballs that are available via an unchanging URL. Quite conveniently, GitHub has a built-in archive feature that automatically turns every…
Don’t get me wrong: I have nothing against Homebrew , the macOS package manager that most devs who run Apple laptops use on a near-daily basis. It’s served me admirably all these years and I’ve even written some Homebrew recipes. But I’ve become convinced that there’s a better way—or at least a way that suits my needs better. I recently switched from Homebrew to…
Service mesh is a blazing hot topic in software engineering right now and rightfully so. I think it’s extremely promising technology and I’d love to see it widely adopted (in cases where it truly makes sense). Yet it remains shrouded in mystery for many people and even those who are familiar with it have trouble articulating what it’s good for and what it even is (like yours…
I’m a huge fan of databases, so much so that I’ve written a book on so-called “NoSQL” databases, I spent some of my most fruitful years in tech working on the highly influential distributed database Riak , and I even built a database called Purple last year just for fun. Naturally, I’m always on the lookout for new and exciting developments in databases and DB-related…
I’ve contributed to many very large documentation projects in my day, including Riak , Kubernetes , Prometheus , Pulsar , Heron , BookKeeper , and several others. On all of those projects I worked as some combination of tech writer, web designer, and build system “plumbing” person (i.e. the person in charge of making sure that the documentation inputs are converted into the right…
Hello! I wanted to tell you all about an open source project I’m working on that I’m pretty excited about. It’s called Tract and it’s a Hugo theme for large documentation projects. I aim to release version 0.1.0 by the end of 2019. In the meantime, check out the current home page or a sample docs page .
All right folks, I’m doing it old school. I like Medium well enough, but I thought this would be a fun personal project and a chance to both flex my design muscles a little bit and gain full control over how I present information. Stay tuned!