The Portfolio Paradox “Which graphic designer has the best portfolio? The one who doesn’t have work.” My old graphic designer colleague said this, and holy shit, it’s true for all of us in tech. When do I have time to work on my personal blog? When I’m not shipping releases, fixing production bugs, or juggling 20 side projects. Wait, did I say 20? Yeah. Twenty. Maybe more. I lost count. ...
How I went from an overengineered Docker + Tilt.dev setup to just running Hugo directly, and why sometimes simpler is better.
Introduction Over the past few days, I’ve been working on adding Docker support to the vagrant-wsl2-provider plugin. This turned out to be more challenging than expected, but the journey taught me a lot about WSL2’s internals, systemd initialization, and multi-distribution package management. In this post, I’ll walk through the development process, the challenges we faced, and how we solved them to get Docker running on 8 different Linux distributions in WSL2 through Vagrant. ...
The Testing Problem Nobody Talks About After getting Docker support working, I wanted to add snapshot functionality to the vagrant-wsl2-provider. But there was a nagging problem I’d been avoiding: how do you actually test a Vagrant provider plugin? The “proper” way would be to write Ruby unit tests with RSpec, mock all of Vagrant’s internals, and test each component in isolation. But here’s the thing - Vagrant is a massive gem with heavy dependencies. Just getting the test environment set up requires pulling in the entire Vagrant gem, which then requires native extensions, specific Ruby versions, and a whole dependency chain that’s… painful. ...
The Final Push to v0.1.0 After testing the provider on my corporate machine, I discovered a bug related to the missing Windows HOME environment variable. The provider was trying to cache files on a NAS drive (mapped as U:) instead of the local user directory. After fixing this by switching to Vagrant.user_data_path, I felt confident that v0.1.0 was nearly ready. All that remained was a comprehensive test run across all available WSL distributions. ...
Building a Vagrant WSL2 Provider: Clean Development Environments on Windows Working with development environments on Windows has always been a challenge. While VirtualBox and VMware provide excellent virtualization, they come with resource overhead and performance penalties. Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 (WSL2) offers a compelling alternative with near-native performance, but lacks the standardized workflow that Vagrant provides. This led me to an interesting project: building a custom Vagrant provider for WSL2 that combines the best of both worlds - the familiar Vagrant workflow with WSL2’s performance benefits. ...
You probably won’t be interested in this article, so feel free to scroll on. :) I’m about to write a boring, possibly lengthy story about my current challenges in brand building. I’d like to better introduce GoSecNinja OÜ and the Curious Minds Collective. This surely won’t be an important lesson for you. Whenever I show someone my personal website, where I’ll publish this article first, this is one of the first questions I get: How did you create it? ...
In my latest post, I discussed a potential pricing strategy and related services. Links are provided at the end of the post. Now, it’s time to communicate this. Sounds simple, right? Well, it’s not as straightforward as it seems. Before we make any assumptions, what I’m about to discuss may be particularly useful for associations of fewer than five people, but it can also serve as a reference for larger companies. ...
As I embark on the task of creating landing pages to showcase my service and pricing, I’m exploring a few cost-effective and time-efficient solutions. These include ready-made templates and website builders that require minimal coding. However, while these options are relatively quick and cheap, they still demand a certain amount of time and effort. This brings to mind the first law of pretotyping (yes, pre, not prototyping): How can you try out something with the least amount of resources? Creating a landing page is not exactly that… But more on this in another post. ...
In a previous article, I shared my biggest failure in cybersecurity. If you’re curious about the article, you can read it here: My biggest failure in cyber security. In short, it was about our lack of awareness regarding secret management and how, as an information security professional, I failed to impart this even to my own family. However, I overlooked the fact that it might not even be necessary. Believe me, it’s quite challenging for me to write about why one doesn’t need to deal with password management, considering it’s partly what I do for a living - helping others secure their valuables. But still, I will give it a try with the help of the Observability pattern. ...