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GitHub has included it s own OCI image registry for a long time but it s only recently that I ended up needing it. While authenticating docker printed out a warning Things like this bug me, so I wanted to loop back and figure this out. Getting a token Using GitHub s container registry requires an auth token, Continue reading "Using ghcr: a credential managment side quest"
The Canadian Government, despite some earnest attempts at Digital Transformation, feels stuck in a rut. It s my feeling that the root cause of that rut is there has been a paradigm shift that slid past unnoticed and the Government of Canada is now stuck because of it. The two paradigms There seems to be two Continue reading "Navigating IT paradigms"
Despite the Government of Canada having a web presence for 30 years now, one of the weirdly persistent problems when building government web applications is how to deal with logos. The problem is with what is known as signature blocks ; the combination of flag plus department name (or just Government of Canada ) that you ll find Continue reading "Dealing with Government of Canada logos on the web"
Build vs buy is presented as a fundamental binary choice that organizations must make as part of their due diligence around technology projects. Here in 2025, this idea is suffering from concept drift that makes its simplistic dichotomy a dangerous one, especially for governments. The Build option The first problem with build vs buy is Continue reading "Build vs buy in government"
With the sunsetting of Create React App, I ve wanted to find something similar but with a more minimalistic vibe. Two projects that caught my eye are the Rust-based rewrite of Webpack called Rspack, and it s Create React App equivalent companion project Rsbuild. Of course here in Canada I m going to want that along with proper Continue reading "i18n for Rsbuild with Lingui"
Enterprise architecture (EA) is a troublesome discipline. I think it s fair to argue that the famous Bezos API mandate and the birth of AWS are both essentially enterprise architecture efforts as is Simian Army from Netflix. These efforts have clearly delivered a huge positive business impact, but it s much harder to make that case for Continue reading "Only enterprise architects can save us from…
With the resignation of the CIO of the Government of Canada, the person placed at the top of the Canadian public service to fix the existing approach to IT, there is lots of discussion about what s broken and how to fix it. Across these discussions, one thing stands out to me: IT security always seems Continue reading "Modernise security to modernise government"
Running a database on Kubernetes is still considered a bit of a novelty, but ArangoDB has been doing exactly that as part of their managed service, and has released the Kube-ArangoDB operator they built to do it, so we can do it too. I found there was a bit of a learning curve with Kube-ArangoDB, Continue reading "ArangoDB on Kubernetes"
Lots has been written about how Docker combines linux kernel features like namespaces and cgroups to isolate processes. One overlooked kernel feature that I find really interesting is Overlay FS. Overlay FS was built into the kernel back in 2014, and provides a way to present a filesystem which is the result over overlaying one Continue reading "A look at Overlay FS"
If you are working with Kubernetes, it s pretty important to be able to generate variations of your configuration. Your production cluster probably has TLS settings that won t make sense in while testing locally in Minikube, or you ll have service types that should be NodePort here and LoadBalancer there. While tools like Helm tackle this problem Continue reading "Kubernetes config with Kustomize"