Personal Infrastructure - Bruno Scheufler

I have been on and off hosting my own infrastructure for the last couple of years. Some projects have been deprecated and removed again, some live on to this day.

Dec 03, 2023

Recording Better Demos

Recording videos always seemed like a huge ordeal to me. For a good demo, not only do you make sure that everything works, hope that you’ve selected the right mic (sorry Tim), and select the right window to record, you need to set up the environment just right. This goes beyond cleaning up your desktop (moving all files to the peculiar ‘stuff’ folder in the process) and trying hard not to leak any secrets. You need to make sure the installed software matches what you want to showcase, doesn’t use any previous configurations from development sessions, and mirrors what real users would experience in their workflow....Video Production

May 13, 2023

Instant Linux VMs without the Installation

Typically, installing one of the major Linux distributions like Ubuntu or Debian requires going through an interactive installation wizard. This is great when you have a screen and keyboard but less ergonomic in a virtualized scenario, for example when you’re running in qemu/kvm....Systems Architecture, Containers

Apr 30, 2023

Reproducible VMs for Local Development

Lately, I’ve been exploring x86 Linux machines for building and running a Kubernetes development environment. Since I’m using an Apple Silicon MBP as my daily driver, I had to get creative and tried a couple of options ending on a pretty robust workflow I wanted to outline. Throughout the process, I noticed parallels to current trends in cloud development environments, including the benefits of easily reproducible, instant environments for effective experimentation....Systems Architecture, Containers

Apr 17, 2022

Routing Traffic for Dynamic Deployments using Traefik

Whenever I needed to route traffic to one of my side project deployments, I typically chose nginx in the past. I knew the setup process, including requesting certificates using an ACME client like Certbot with LetsEncrypt. Over time, however, adding new deployments started getting tedious....Systems Architecture

Feb 12, 2022

Reviewing User-Generated Content with Interactive Slack Messages

Building a consumer-oriented service where users can submit their own content, be it profile pictures, images, or any other media that is shown to other users on your platform requires careful planning ahead of time. Especially when you want to build a safe environment for your users, allowing people to upload anything without further verification will inevitably lead to critical situations....Product Development

Jan 16, 2022

Indexing Pages Programmatically Using the Indexing API

When you manage websites with more than a dozen pages, it can get hard to make sure search engines like Google know when to index newly-added content. Some pages may change frequently, and the classic way of publishing a page, then waiting a couple of days to see if Google picked it up might not be feasible....Automation

Oct 17, 2021

Updating Notion Pages on a Schedule with GitHub Actions

About five months ago, Notion launched their long-awaited public API. The team initially delivered basic features and continuously improved the surface with more functionality and block types to support a growing number of use cases....Automation, GitHub Actions, CI/CD

Aug 15, 2021

Analyzing Blog Performance Using R

When putting out content on the internet, it's interesting to see how everything performs, especially over time. While some topics might gain relevance, others may become less important. This is affected by broader trends in the industry, but also the nature of the content itself. Some blogs are dedicated to one specific topic, others vary their focus....R, Data Science, Statistics

Apr 18, 2021

Processing Markdown with remark and unified plugins

Markdown is one of the most popular formats for writing anything on the web, ranging from documentation, to everything on GitHub, to blog posts. The CommonMark specification provided a standardized collection of supported tags to use for formatting and set readability as the primary goal....Markdown, unified.js, remark, Abstract Syntax Tree (AST)

Feb 26, 2021

Preventing Increasing Fragmentation

How many SaaS applications do you use frequently? If you're working for a medium-sized company, chances are, that your number of subscriptions ranges from tens to hundreds. So many, that you wouldn't know which tools people on the other end of your org are using, with dozens of inactive subscriptions that drain budgets....Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), Company Budgeting

Oct 16, 2020

My Favorite Tools in 2020

We use countless software products during the day, whether it's for communicating with our colleagues at work, taking notes, consuming content, writing and deploying code, and all the other tasks we're getting done....Productivity

Aug 28, 2020

Forwarding Incoming Mails with AWS Lambda and SES

We all have that one domain we want to receive incoming mails on. Whether it's a side project or even the personal domain, being able to forward incoming emails back to our personal inbox can be extremely useful....Amazon Web Services (AWS), Simple Email Service (SES), Simple Storage Service (S3), Golang

Jul 26, 2020

Tunneling Local Applications with SSH and Caddy

Recently, I was working on a side project which would rely on webhooks from third-party providers, like GitHub, to be picked up by my service exposing a simple HTTP endpoint. Testing this configuration proved to be harder than I initially thought. Of course, I could have just emulated the expected payload, but being able to perform real actions in the other service and seeing the results flow in would have been even better....Secure Shell Protocol (SSH)

Apr 25, 2020

Rapidly Setting up GraphQL Data Fetching in React

Setting up the groundwork for querying your backend APIs should be a quick process, not fiddling around with configuration. Often it can be intimidating to integrate libraries to manage connectivity, caching, and other important features your application is going to benefit from, which is one of the reasons for the massive adoption of Apollo Client. But this alone still requires you to put in the time to write your queries, and, when using TypeScript, to declare your types. I've been able to kickstart a flexible setup revolving around apollo-boost (which can be replaced with the fully-fledged version easily) and GraphQL Code Generator, an amazing project by the Guild. Everything from generating code and types for my queries to receiving fully-typed responses in the form of a React hook is covered by the seemingly-simple configuration....GraphQL, Apollo, React

Jun 09, 2019

Automating my open-source projects with CI/CD workflows

When you maintain more than a couple of projects, managing dependency upgrades, code quality checks, tests, and publishing releases becomes a chore you'll inevitably face during a project's lifecycle. In addition to this being neither fun, nor a rewarding task, it consumes a lot of time to pull the latest changes, double-check that everything works fine and then publish to different release targets....Automation, GitHub, Open-Source

Dec 22, 2019

Back to Bare-Metal: Building and Hosting my Metrics

For the longest time, I chose not to set up any metrics for my projects, including my personal site (the one you're currently viewing), since I didn't expect any remarkable metrics to come out of this process whatsoever. Now, that I'd like to see how my posts are performing, I've ended up with next to no fine-grained metrics except the number of requests going through Cloudflare, which is nice but clearly not enough. That's why I spent the last days setting up a very cost-effective and hopefully long-lasting infrastructure for persisting the metrics I want to track....Metrics, InfluxDB