https://www.kostaharlan.net/Recent content on Kosta HarlanHugoen-usFri, 04 Oct 2024 09:07:42 +0200https://www.kostaharlan.net/posts/this-considered-harmful/Fri, 04 Oct 2024 08:17:22 +0200https://www.kostaharlan.net/posts/this-considered-harmful/I wrote about Google's Technical Writing course before, tl;dr, if you're a software engineer, and you haven't yet read through Google's Technical Writing course: I recommend it.https://www.kostaharlan.net/posts/meeting-notes/Mon, 30 Sep 2024 20:11:17 +0200https://www.kostaharlan.net/posts/meeting-notes/I spend a lot of time in meetings. Some things I've learned: Every meeting needs notes. Writing things down means something.https://www.kostaharlan.net/posts/mnemopynge/Fri, 30 Aug 2024 13:50:55 +0200https://www.kostaharlan.net/posts/mnemopynge/Antique mosaic of Mnemosyne. National Archaeological Museum of Tarragona, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons Wikimedia Commons Some sketches of a project I've had in mind that I am thinking of with the name mnemopynge (mnemo = memory, pynge… well, like ping-y), i.https://www.kostaharlan.net/posts/getting-better-fy24-25/Fri, 26 Jul 2024 13:16:59 +0300https://www.kostaharlan.net/posts/getting-better-fy24-25/Happy new (nonprofit fiscal) year! 🥳 July 1 marked the start of the FY24-25 annual plan for Wikimedia Foundation. Together with colleagues, I've been working the last couple of months on lining up some interesting projects for improving anti-abuse capabilities on the wikis under the WE4.https://www.kostaharlan.net/posts/loading-spur-jsonl-data-into-opensearch/Sun, 30 Jun 2024 22:54:13 +0200https://www.kostaharlan.net/posts/loading-spur-jsonl-data-into-opensearch/I recently had the experience of working out how to import a daily feed of tens of millions lines of JSONL data into OpenSearch.https://www.kostaharlan.net/posts/2024-05-27-recent-changes/Mon, 27 May 2024 11:24:11 +0200https://www.kostaharlan.net/posts/2024-05-27-recent-changes/What is this guy talking about? Robert Sim, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Common At the beginning of this month, I had the good fortune to attend the 2024 Wikimedia Hackathon in Tallinn, Estonia.https://www.kostaharlan.net/posts/google-docs-to-org-mode/Fri, 24 May 2024 08:56:41 +0200https://www.kostaharlan.net/posts/google-docs-to-org-mode/If that demo is intriguing to you, read on! Why I use the superb denote package for my personal notes repository, with org-mode for formatting.https://www.kostaharlan.net/posts/2024-w18-recent-changes/Tue, 30 Apr 2024 19:32:46 +0200https://www.kostaharlan.net/posts/2024-w18-recent-changes/It's been a strange month. There were several deaths in and around my field of view, each one sudden and unexpected.https://www.kostaharlan.net/posts/2024-w12-recent-changes/Mon, 18 Mar 2024 22:05:28 +0100https://www.kostaharlan.net/posts/2024-w12-recent-changes/Reading On a bit of a whim, I picked up and read through Slow Productivity. I found parts of it insightful but was struggling to see how it would really apply to e.https://www.kostaharlan.net/posts/tracking-time/Fri, 15 Mar 2024 08:50:47 +0100https://www.kostaharlan.net/posts/tracking-time/Time sheet from 1909; Halbert Powers Gillette, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons I spent nine years working for digital agencies, where one lives and dies by the sword 15 minute billable unit of time.https://www.kostaharlan.net/posts/2024-w10-recent-changes/Mon, 11 Mar 2024 11:17:28 +0100https://www.kostaharlan.net/posts/2024-w10-recent-changes/Organizing I'm testing some adjustments to my organizational system: Keeping all 1:1 notes in a single file per person / recurring meetings in a single file per meeting, rather than one note per meeting.https://www.kostaharlan.net/posts/2024-w9-recent-changes/Mon, 04 Mar 2024 11:58:02 +0100https://www.kostaharlan.net/posts/2024-w9-recent-changes/I started reading Fred Brooks' The Mythical Man-Month and am enjoying the La Brea Tar Pits metaphors & writing (though I wish someone had thought to update usages of "man" everywhere to neutral terms).https://www.kostaharlan.net/posts/2024-w8-recent-changes/Mon, 26 Feb 2024 21:32:35 +0100https://www.kostaharlan.net/posts/2024-w8-recent-changes/A dazzling city rose up from the marches, adorned with glorious churches and beautiful palazzi, built on the lucrative proceeds of prolific trading with the east.https://www.kostaharlan.net/posts/2024-w6-recent-changes/Mon, 12 Feb 2024 18:01:18 +0100https://www.kostaharlan.net/posts/2024-w6-recent-changes/The main thing is that, you can hear the birds in the morning now, and green is returning to the forest.https://www.kostaharlan.net/posts/2024-w5-recent-changes/Wed, 07 Feb 2024 09:06:27 +0100https://www.kostaharlan.net/posts/2024-w5-recent-changes/The tens digit has moved a notch forward–I'm not sure what to make of that, really. But overall, I feel good.https://www.kostaharlan.net/posts/2024-w4-recent-changes/Mon, 29 Jan 2024 22:01:34 +0100https://www.kostaharlan.net/posts/2024-w4-recent-changes/I've been thinking about what it takes to learn a system, prompted by some discussions about the ease (or lack of) of being a proficient developer with MediaWiki as deployed in Wikimedia sites.https://www.kostaharlan.net/posts/2024-w3-recent-changes/Mon, 22 Jan 2024 12:03:10 +0100https://www.kostaharlan.net/posts/2024-w3-recent-changes/German winter rolls on. This week we had at least a few centimeters of snow, enough to make our way to one of the handful of hills around here.https://www.kostaharlan.net/posts/2024-w2-recent-changes/Mon, 15 Jan 2024 11:23:17 +0100https://www.kostaharlan.net/posts/2024-w2-recent-changes/Wieder zurück. On the last day of 2023 I got COVID and was sick for ~10 days, so I skipped last week's recent changes and normal weekly review routine.https://www.kostaharlan.net/posts/2023-w51-recent-changes/Mon, 18 Dec 2023 12:29:59 +0100https://www.kostaharlan.net/posts/2023-w51-recent-changes/This is going to be a short one, because while it's not the last week of the year, it's the last one where I plan to be at a computer and thus time is short.https://www.kostaharlan.net/posts/2023-w50-recent-changes/Mon, 11 Dec 2023 11:42:32 +0100https://www.kostaharlan.net/posts/2023-w50-recent-changes/My wrist is better, though still hurting, and I'm back typing away on the Model 100 which is a superior experience to the Atreus in nearly every way.https://www.kostaharlan.net/posts/2023-w49-recent-changes/Mon, 04 Dec 2023 11:36:05 +0100https://www.kostaharlan.net/posts/2023-w49-recent-changes/I sprained my wrist on Thursday night, probably worse than I ever have before, while goalkeeping in a football match with friends.https://www.kostaharlan.net/posts/2023-w48-recent-changes/Mon, 27 Nov 2023 10:55:37 +0100https://www.kostaharlan.net/posts/2023-w48-recent-changes/Winter's here. First snow (0.01 cm or so!) during A's football match on Saturday. This time of year is hard; the sun sets by 4pm, the forest becomes muddy and leafless.https://www.kostaharlan.net/posts/turn-off-mariadb-verbose-logging/Thu, 23 Nov 2023 09:03:26 +0100https://www.kostaharlan.net/posts/turn-off-mariadb-verbose-logging/tl;dr: Make sure you switch off verbose logging for MariaDB once you've finished debugging. Last month I was troubleshooting some connection issues with a NodeJS app.https://www.kostaharlan.net/posts/2023-w47-recent-changes/Mon, 20 Nov 2023 15:23:00 +0100https://www.kostaharlan.net/posts/2023-w47-recent-changes/Like last week, I'm thinking a lot about Gaza. One thing I've been reflecting on is the "reality" of the conflict I experience as mediated by different platforms.https://www.kostaharlan.net/posts/and-commit-message-anti-pattern/Mon, 20 Nov 2023 08:00:27 +0100https://www.kostaharlan.net/posts/and-commit-message-anti-pattern/I try to avoid the word “and” in git commit subject messages. If I find myself typing “and” in the subject, I usually stop what I’m doing and rethink the scope of the commit.https://www.kostaharlan.net/posts/recent-changes-13-11/Mon, 13 Nov 2023 09:40:34 +0100https://www.kostaharlan.net/posts/recent-changes-13-11/(What is this?1) I’ve been thinking a lot about Palestine. I went to a local demonstration calling for a ceasefire on Saturday.https://www.kostaharlan.net/posts/new-tools/Tue, 31 Oct 2023 21:32:03 +0100https://www.kostaharlan.net/posts/new-tools/I’m experimenting with a few replacements for my existing workflows: Todoist, in place of org-mode for task organization Obsidian, in place of org-mode for notes Zotero, in place of trying to locate things I read by typing characters into Firefox’s address bar and hoping for a match I chose Obsidian (and started using Zotero) after reading How to take smart notes.https://www.kostaharlan.net/posts/do-not-disturb/Sun, 24 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000https://www.kostaharlan.net/posts/do-not-disturb/One Sunday afternoon this month, I set my phone on “Do Not Disturb” mode, then decided to leave it that way for a week, as an experiment.https://www.kostaharlan.net/posts/presentation-to-cs-students/Thu, 31 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000https://www.kostaharlan.net/posts/presentation-to-cs-students/Earlier this year I had the opportunity to speak with computer science high school students about career advice & a what’s-a-day-in-the-life-like type of thing.https://www.kostaharlan.net/posts/new-focus/Thu, 06 Jul 2023 15:02:00 +0200https://www.kostaharlan.net/posts/new-focus/In June, I reached the five year mark at Wikimedia Foundation.1 Wow, that feels like a long time! 🌻 ⏳https://www.kostaharlan.net/posts/wait+scheduled/Fri, 30 Jun 2023 11:50:37 +0200https://www.kostaharlan.net/posts/wait+scheduled/I recently made my way through Getting Things Done (GTD). I wish I had done it a while ago! I’ve read many surface-level summaries in blog posts or in tutorials for organizational tools about how to use GTD.https://www.kostaharlan.net/posts/hackathon-notes/Wed, 31 May 2023 20:28:00 +0200https://www.kostaharlan.net/posts/hackathon-notes/Photograph by Mike Peel (www.mikepeel.net)., CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons Earlier this month I had the pleasure and privilege of attending the Wikimedia 2023 Hackathon in Athens, Greece 🇬🇷.https://www.kostaharlan.net/posts/meeting-attention/Fri, 28 Apr 2023 10:11:23 +0200https://www.kostaharlan.net/posts/meeting-attention/Much of my day-to-day work as a software engineer involves multi-tasking, more multi-tasking, and then multi-tasking while multi-tasking.1 Transitioning from that to sustained focus in online, multi-person meetings is hard (relevant Calvin and Hobbes comic).https://www.kostaharlan.net/posts/scheduling-tips/Fri, 31 Mar 2023 11:53:16 +0200https://www.kostaharlan.net/posts/scheduling-tips/A while back, a colleague wrote two brilliant posts time zone trickery, and practicing inconvenience for a more equitable workplace. If you haven’t yet read those posts, really, head over there now and go read them.https://www.kostaharlan.net/turkish-makam-leipzig/Tue, 07 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000https://www.kostaharlan.net/turkish-makam-leipzig/If you’re in Leipzig, DE and interested to play Turkish makam / classical Ottoman music / traditional Greek music, please contact me!https://www.kostaharlan.net/posts/pomegranates-in-january/Sun, 05 Feb 2023 18:25:20 +0100https://www.kostaharlan.net/posts/pomegranates-in-january/It snowed, I remember that, the wheelchair ramp covered by a thin sheen of ice. Roland, the hospice nurse, appeared in our lives.https://www.kostaharlan.net/posts/i-deleted-slack-from-my-phone/Fri, 13 Jan 2023 09:22:10 +0100https://www.kostaharlan.net/posts/i-deleted-slack-from-my-phone/I have, once again, deleted Slack from my phone. It was an early new year’s gift to myself. This time I hope it will stick.https://www.kostaharlan.net/posts/a-year-of-writing-club/Wed, 21 Dec 2022 19:35:29 +0100https://www.kostaharlan.net/posts/a-year-of-writing-club/The current configuration of my writing club at work has lasted for more than a year. We tried to find a time to meet for reflection and celebration, but it is tricky to find a convenient time for Colorado and Croatia / Germany.https://www.kostaharlan.net/posts/build-your-own-d3/Thu, 10 Nov 2022 09:59:38 +0100https://www.kostaharlan.net/posts/build-your-own-d3/File this in the maybe-it’s-obvious-to-others-but-not-to-me category: here’s a quick post about how you can craft your own d3.js build with just the d3 packages that you need.https://www.kostaharlan.net/posts/twitter-mastodon/Tue, 08 Nov 2022 21:45:17 +0100https://www.kostaharlan.net/posts/twitter-mastodon/I admit I had not paid much attention to Mastodon. Sorry! But along with 70,000 others, recent events1 pushed me enough to check it out.https://www.kostaharlan.net/posts/building-a-client-for-image-suggestions/Fri, 28 Oct 2022 13:33:54 +0200https://www.kostaharlan.net/posts/building-a-client-for-image-suggestions/In a previous post I wrote about how we built the image suggestions feature for Special:Homepage on Wikipedia. But that is just one implementation, bound specifically to a web client accessing Special:Homepage.https://www.kostaharlan.net/notes/25-october-2022/Tue, 25 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0000https://www.kostaharlan.net/notes/25-october-2022/[reading] Wikimedia is adding new tools to make Wikipedia more fun to edit - The Verge [reading] Clean Architecture by Robert C.https://www.kostaharlan.net/notes/17-october-2022/Mon, 17 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0000https://www.kostaharlan.net/notes/17-october-2022/“knock on effects”, thinking about how one patch then breaks downstream tools, and how we could avoid this as it’s so time-consuming https://gerrit.https://www.kostaharlan.net/notes/14-october-2022/Fri, 14 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0000https://www.kostaharlan.net/notes/14-october-2022/TIL: Divje Babe flute: The Neanderthal musical instrument from Divje babe I meets all the requirements to be called the oldest known musical instrument.https://www.kostaharlan.net/notes/11-october-2022/Tue, 11 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0000https://www.kostaharlan.net/notes/11-october-2022/Fixing an unbreak now issue affecting authentication in CI and beta cluster. From the perspective of it’s not your fault, should probably write about some systemic issues: not allowing force-merge, automated architecture fitness function review of e.https://www.kostaharlan.net/notes/10-october-2022/Mon, 10 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0000https://www.kostaharlan.net/notes/10-october-2022/[engineering] Publishing notes from an org-mode file (one section per day) with ox-hugo, let’s see how it goes. [music] Nihavend Saz Semai, Hasib Dede colleague pointed out how Google Docs “unfurl” function fails weirdly for some Gerrit patches.https://www.kostaharlan.net/posts/shipping-production-faster/Fri, 07 Oct 2022 10:28:13 +0200https://www.kostaharlan.net/posts/shipping-production-faster/Earlier this week I facilitated an impromptu “unconference” session at my team’s offsite: Shipping to production faster: can we? should we?https://www.kostaharlan.net/posts/philosophy-software-design-review/Fri, 30 Sep 2022 10:58:49 +0200https://www.kostaharlan.net/posts/philosophy-software-design-review/I’ve recently been re-reading A Philosopy of Software Design by John Ousterhout. The origin of the book is interesting. The author taught a university course on software design in which students worked together to build software projects, then perform code reviews and retrospectives to analyze weaknesses and improve on the design.https://www.kostaharlan.net/posts/image-suggestions/Wed, 31 Aug 2022 11:33:41 +0200https://www.kostaharlan.net/posts/image-suggestions/My team at Wikimedia Foundation (the Growth team) recently completed an iteration of work on Wikipedia’s image suggestion feature. We built the feature on top of a data pipeline, MediaWiki (the PHP framework behind Wikipedia), VisualEditor (MediaWiki’s WYSIWYG editor), and ElasticSearch.https://www.kostaharlan.net/posts/four-years-wikimedia/Tue, 19 Jul 2022 22:48:59 +0200https://www.kostaharlan.net/posts/four-years-wikimedia/Last month I celebrated four years of working at Wikimedia Foundation. 🎂🥳✨ That’s eons in tech, so to commemorate this milestone, here’s a post with four notes about these years–plus a bonus, fifth announcement at the end!https://www.kostaharlan.net/posts/technical-writing/Thu, 30 Jun 2022 00:00:00 +0000https://www.kostaharlan.net/posts/technical-writing/My team takes verbatim notes during meetings: as you speak, you see your initials appear in the notes document, followed by an interpretation of what you’ve just said.https://www.kostaharlan.net/posts/how-i-org-mode-2022/Tue, 31 May 2022 12:12:03 +0200https://www.kostaharlan.net/posts/how-i-org-mode-2022/Following up from Being organized, here’s some explanation of what I am doing day-to-day to be organized at work. This what works for me; it very likely won’t work exactly for you.https://www.kostaharlan.net/posts/being-organized/Thu, 28 Apr 2022 00:00:00 +0000https://www.kostaharlan.net/posts/being-organized/One of the essential skills in software engineering is being organized. I don’t mean how your team organizes its tasks, or the processes you use to divide those tasks up—of course that’s important too.https://www.kostaharlan.net/posts/its-not-your-fault/Tue, 29 Mar 2022 22:25:09 +0200https://www.kostaharlan.net/posts/its-not-your-fault/Occasionally there’s a thread on tech twitter inviting people, senior developers especially, to share about a time they broke production.https://www.kostaharlan.net/posts/ctrl-r/Mon, 28 Feb 2022 13:24:40 +0100https://www.kostaharlan.net/posts/ctrl-r/The single most useful command in my toolbox is Ctrl-r. I’m often surprised how many people don’t use it, so here’s a brief post about what it is and why you might want use it.https://www.kostaharlan.net/posts/broken-httpd-macos-homebrew/Fri, 07 Jan 2022 14:12:03 +0100https://www.kostaharlan.net/posts/broken-httpd-macos-homebrew/I use httpd from Homebrew (brew install httpd) as the web server for my local MediaWiki development instance. Mostly that works just fine, and I’ve documented how I’ve set it up in another post here.https://www.kostaharlan.net/posts/wikimedia-selenium/Wed, 15 Dec 2021 10:25:54 +0100https://www.kostaharlan.net/posts/wikimedia-selenium/In the previous post, we saw that the Selenium job in Ci is by far the slowest one in the group, at around 22 minutes.https://www.kostaharlan.net/2021-11-29-on-not-making-ci-faster-part-1/Mon, 29 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0000https://www.kostaharlan.net/2021-11-29-on-not-making-ci-faster-part-1/Contents Part 1: Status quo (you are here) Part 2: Selenium Part 3: Parallelization Part 4: PHPUnit Part 5: Miscellaneous + bonus round The problem Every now and then I find myself staring at phab:T225730, “Reduce runtime of MW shared gate Jenkins jobs to 5 min”.https://www.kostaharlan.net/posts/mediawiki-docker-macos-ii/Tue, 16 Feb 2021 09:23:05 +0100https://www.kostaharlan.net/posts/mediawiki-docker-macos-ii/In a previous post I wrote about speeding up Docker for Mac by giving up on Docker for Mac (tl;dr SSH tunnels and PhpStorm’s deploy feature to work on a remote server).https://www.kostaharlan.net/posts/mediawiki-homebrew-php/Thu, 21 Jan 2021 21:58:22 +0100https://www.kostaharlan.net/posts/mediawiki-homebrew-php/Here’s how I set up MediaWiki for local development on an Apple M1. Everything should apply to Intel based Macs too.https://www.kostaharlan.net/posts/mediawiki-docker-macos/Tue, 08 Dec 2020 20:50:58 +0100https://www.kostaharlan.net/posts/mediawiki-docker-macos/tl;dr: don’t even try I recently attempted to use Docker for Mac with my local MediaWiki setup (using MediaWiki’s docker-compose.yml). As is well-known Docker for Mac struggles with a large number of files synchronized across the host and container file system.https://www.kostaharlan.net/posts/mediawiki-phpunit/Sun, 01 Nov 2020 11:22:38 +0100https://www.kostaharlan.net/posts/mediawiki-phpunit/Tomorrow On December 7 I’m presenting a Wikimedia tech talk on Testing MediaWiki code with PHPUnit. If you prefer text, here’s the blog post version of what I plan to say :)https://www.kostaharlan.net/posts/mediawiki-developer/Thu, 08 Oct 2020 14:14:46 +0200https://www.kostaharlan.net/posts/mediawiki-developer/Random things one learns as a MediaWiki developer. (I wish I started this two years ago.) Version control your LocalSettings.php By design, LocalSettings.https://www.kostaharlan.net/posts/toggling-light-dark-gnome/Tue, 23 Jun 2020 11:20:34 +0200https://www.kostaharlan.net/posts/toggling-light-dark-gnome/Lately I’ve been experimenting with light mode / light color schemes in the terminal and text editor by day, and dark at night.https://www.kostaharlan.net/posts/pappou/Sat, 30 May 2020 22:51:17 +0200https://www.kostaharlan.net/posts/pappou/Πριν από χρόνια η μητέρα μου μ’εστειλε αυτές τις σελίδες που έγραψε ο παππούς μου. Στην ελπίδα ότι θα σας ενδιαφέρουν η/κ εμπνεύσουν, τα μοιράζω εδώ:https://www.kostaharlan.net/h-arhi/Sat, 30 May 2020 22:40:14 +0200https://www.kostaharlan.net/h-arhi/ΝΙΚΟΛΑΟΣ ΙΩΑΝΝΟΥ 18/11/1922-28/5/1989 Η αρχή είναι το ίμισι του πάντος .Αυτό τουλάχιστον λέγανε οι παλιώτεροί μας και πρέπει να είχαν απόλυτο δίκιο.https://www.kostaharlan.net/posts/coronavirus-learn-from-mistakes/Mon, 30 Mar 2020 12:06:42 +0200https://www.kostaharlan.net/posts/coronavirus-learn-from-mistakes/Back in high school I got in big trouble in my senior year. One night while feeling utterly dejected and disappointed with myself I remember one of my boarding house teachers telling me, basically, not to overdo it – everyone makes mistakes, the important thing is to learn from them.https://www.kostaharlan.net/posts/rtfm-docker-pkg/Tue, 10 Mar 2020 09:56:54 +0100https://www.kostaharlan.net/posts/rtfm-docker-pkg/In today’s edition of RTFM… I’ve been working on building Docker images to use with MediaWiki’s docker-compose development environment. We don’t use standard Dockerfiles and docker build commands, instead we use an in-house tool called docker-pkg, which uses Jinja for additional templating.https://www.kostaharlan.net/posts/polarization/Mon, 02 Mar 2020 13:14:34 +0100https://www.kostaharlan.net/posts/polarization/The incumbent in Leipzig’s mayoral election was re-elected yesterday. h/t to Daniel K who pointed me to this map of Leipzig’s political polarization.https://www.kostaharlan.net/2018-04-03-makam-segah/Tue, 03 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000https://www.kostaharlan.net/2018-04-03-makam-segah/This week, I’m working on the segâh makam, in particular Segâh Saz Semâî composed by Nâyî Osman Dede (1652-1729), sheet music courtesy of neyzen.https://www.kostaharlan.net/2018-04-02-turkish-music-workshop/Mon, 02 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000https://www.kostaharlan.net/2018-04-02-turkish-music-workshop/I recently had the pleasure of attending the 7th annual Turkish music institue workshop in New York. The workshop had 5 concurrent seminars: Ahmet Erdoğdular for Ottoman singing, Ross Daly on modal music and composition, Yurdal Tokcan on oud, Goksel Baktagir for kanun, and the class I went to, Ömer Erdoğdular on the ney.https://www.kostaharlan.net/2018-01-05/Fri, 05 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000https://www.kostaharlan.net/2018-01-05/I know I’m late to the party on the here’s-my-thoughts-on-this-exam-and-acquia-certification-in-general but anyway, here’s a take from 2018. On certifications in general When Acquia announced their certification program, I was opposed to it for mostly the same reasons that many others articulated better than I can or will here: why should Acquia be the arbiter of truth; it’s too expensive; the certification shouldn’t become a mark of qualifications; this is too corporate, etc.https://www.kostaharlan.net/2017-11-16-simple-solutions/Thu, 16 Nov 2017 00:00:00 +0000https://www.kostaharlan.net/2017-11-16-simple-solutions/Earlier today I began to see build errors on a client project: The command "sudo apt-get update" failed and exited with 100 during .https://www.kostaharlan.net/2017-10-21-domna-samiou/Sat, 21 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000https://www.kostaharlan.net/2017-10-21-domna-samiou/This year marks five years since Domna Samiou passed away. There will be a celebration of her legacy this weekend in Athens.https://www.kostaharlan.net/2017-10-18-reboot/Wed, 18 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000https://www.kostaharlan.net/2017-10-18-reboot/Faithful readers will notice I recently rebooted my blog. This May, after completing the superb React Fundamentals course, I decided to rebuild my Jekyll-based as a ReactJS-powered site.https://www.kostaharlan.net/2017-05-12-travis-ci-docker-ce-17/Fri, 12 May 2017 00:00:00 +0000https://www.kostaharlan.net/2017-05-12-travis-ci-docker-ce-17/For the last year, we’ve been using the wonderful docker-sync utility at work to improve performance on Docker for Mac.https://www.kostaharlan.net/2014-10-28-phpstorm-fonts-linux-tuxjdk/Tue, 28 Oct 2014 00:00:00 +0000https://www.kostaharlan.net/2014-10-28-phpstorm-fonts-linux-tuxjdk/PhpStorm is a great IDE (albeit non-free software) but the default font rendering in Linux is atrocious. A search for “phpstorm linux font rendering” will bring up a few different techniques, but here is what fixed font rendering for me on Fedora 20:https://www.kostaharlan.net/2014-10-21-drupal-semantic-versioning-git-flow/Tue, 21 Oct 2014 00:00:00 +0000https://www.kostaharlan.net/2014-10-21-drupal-semantic-versioning-git-flow/An organized git branching model is essential for managing complexity on long-running Drupal projects. Without it, chaos ensues. In this post, I’ll outline an approach for how to use the popular git flow methodology along with semantic versioning to organize your Drupal project.https://www.kostaharlan.net/2014-08-21-35/Thu, 21 Aug 2014 00:00:00 +0000https://www.kostaharlan.net/2014-08-21-35/Niko would have been 35 today. When I think of Niko, of his struggle, of all the seasons and moments we shared together, August stands apart.https://www.kostaharlan.net/2013-11-12-evening-commute/Tue, 12 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000https://www.kostaharlan.net/2013-11-12-evening-commute/Riding home on the tobacco trail.https://www.kostaharlan.net/2013-11-06-tour-de-wnc/Wed, 06 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000https://www.kostaharlan.net/2013-11-06-tour-de-wnc/After four days, 200 miles and 20,000 feet of climbing, Eric and I finished up our bike tour through the mountains of Western NC.https://www.kostaharlan.net/2013-10-19-head-to-the-hills/Sat, 19 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000https://www.kostaharlan.net/2013-10-19-head-to-the-hills/For a long time now I’ve been planning to go for a bike tour, and next week my first one will become reality.https://www.kostaharlan.net/2013/07/12/honoring-seth-vidal/Fri, 12 Jul 2013 00:00:00 +0000https://www.kostaharlan.net/2013/07/12/honoring-seth-vidal/I wrote a blog post this week, “Honoring Seth Vidal, open-source developer and cyclist”. Seth was a well-known member of the cycling community in Durham; he was cycling on Monday evening when he was hit and killed by a hit-and-run driver.https://www.kostaharlan.net/2013/05/09/hello/Sun, 05 May 2013 00:00:00 +0000https://www.kostaharlan.net/2013/05/09/hello/Dear reader, Here is a simple site with notes on my work, life and whatever else comes along. This is a writing/presentation/development experimental space more than anything else.https://www.kostaharlan.net/about/Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000https://www.kostaharlan.net/about/Hello, world! I’m Konstantinos (Kosta) Harlan. I’m a Greek-American, born and raised in Saudi Arabia, lived for 19 years in the U.