Blog posts from Mike Street (mikestreety.co.uk)
I've recently been utilising and customising Claude Code more - rather than just sticking with what comes out of the box. With more and more of my colleagues and friends adopting AI (and, specifically, Claude), I thought I would share my go-to config when setting it all up. TERMINAL Claude Code on the terminal is where I spend most of my time - I find it is more powerful than the Code element of…
No, I don't want AI added to every product, service and website. No, I do not want to have to shell out for 20 different subscriptions because your product has a specific esoteric LLM that I have to pay separately for just because it can integrate with your software better. AI is a tool, it is not a solution. It doesn't fix the problems in your application, it just burns the world while it uses…
We've been reviewing our secret management process and have been evaluating tools to help with streamlining it. Looking at our current services and platforms, we have narrowed it down to either Bitwarden or Infisical (more details below). This post discusses the differences and compares features. We have a few specific requirements for our secret management tool; the main one being that the…
With several developers and a great deal of production servers we need access to, managing SSH keys and access across them all was getting complex with potential for mistakes and missed authentication. Instead, we decided to set up a bastion/jump host (with a redundant backup) - this means the client servers need just 2 SSH keys added and we manage authentication and access for the team in a…
Keeping track of which developer is connecting to which server can be a job in itself. There are plenty of ways to handle it, from sending logs to dedicated software to writing them to a file that someone has to check manually. Our sshpiper [https://github.com/tg123/sshpiper] setup takes a different approach and sends a Slack notification to a dedicated channel whenever a connection happens. This…
Publishing private composer packages is a fiddly business - especially if you want a usable UI along with it. After much research I came across Packeton [https://github.com/vtsykun/packeton] - an open source fork of Packagist which you can run on a web server of your choosing. This walkthrough sets Packeton up with Docker which requires the least amount of server setup. The following how-to runs…
You've been staring at the same project for weeks. Your design eye is shot and the finish line is in sight. You can't see the wood for the trees. This is exactly when you need fresh eyes. At Liquid Light, that's what the BLAT test is for. BLAT is a timeboxed, no-holds-barred review where everyone gets a go at one of our nearly finished websites. Each person gets an hour to click around, prod…
I recently ran into an issue with DDEV 1.25 and was upgrading and downgrading between the two versions to test, check and verify. Eventually, my DDEV got confused and started producing 404s. With mixed version images & config, I wanted to remove everything and start again. With the help of Claude, I created a bash script which will run through and delete every DDEV related configuration.…
Like 2024, 2025 passed without major incident or upheaval. All in all, it was an enjoyable year - seeing some firsts for us all. LIFE Plenty of goings-on with the Street family this year. Ruby, our youngest, started school which meant another shift in routines and schedules. Alfie moved up to Beavers and Ruby started Squirrels, which now means I'm the only one of our family to not be currently…
We use Makefiles in our repositories to wrangle commands for setting up, pulling and linting our code. Nothing revolutionary, but they've become pretty essential to our workflow. MAKEFILE INCLUDES The thing that initially had me scratching my head was wanting to share commands between sites. A lot of our sites follow the same patterns and need identical Makefile commands - seemed daft to…
This years quiz of the year [category/quiz/] needs the following: * The slides (linked below) * The info and notes below * Pens and paper for your teams The quiz can be played in teams or individually - I'll leave it to you to work it out. There doesn't need to be a "quiz master" per say, just someone who can click "next slide please". SLIDES Get the quiz slides…
After having RustFS [https://www.mikestreety.co.uk/blog/setting-up-rustfs-as-an-amazon-s3-replacement/] running as our Gitlab CI cache [https://www.mikestreety.co.uk/blog/use-minio-to-cache-gitlab-containers-and-runners/] for a few weeks the server (as expected) filled up. Since we're only using RustFS to cache build assets, we can safely bin the old ones without worry. We settled on a 14-day…
Sending emails in this mad world of spam is a tricky business. Spoofing and phishing are all too common, and email providers try to be smart to it, although sometimes at the detriment to honest and "real" emails. If your website is sending emails at all (even to you for contact form responses), it is worth considering spending time to verify that you own the domain and you are allowed to send…
I was at TYPO3 Camp London [https://t3cl25.typo3.com/] recently when Martin Helmich casually dropped that RustFS [https://rustfs.com/en/] was a solid MinIO replacement. That got my attention. I've written about MinIO before - speeding up Gitlab CI [https://www.mikestreety.co.uk/blog/how-i-improved-the-speed-of-docker-builds-in-gitlab-ci/] and caching Gitlab assets…
The idea of shower thoughts are things for you to ponder or wonder, these are ones that I have read on the internet (I take no credit) and often think about for no reason at all. > Sleep is one of the few things we pretend to do to actually do it Close your eyes, lie down and pretend until you actually drift off > Cleaning your teeth is the only time we clean our skeleton You don't see a skull…