Builds on Andrew Quinn's TILs

I still like Jenkins

Sat, 09 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Before GitHub Actions, before GitLab CI/CD, and before the panoply of startups all promising to help you build your software faster and with less hassle, there was the humble, open source Jenkins. Or perhaps I should say is: Jenkins is still actively maintained to this day, and has actually been in use in basically every single place I have worked since graduating from high school, although not everyone who was using it was exactly happy with it.

Where is the DevOps for Yocto?

Sat, 27 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The cozy world of DevOps has spoiled me with tools like Ansible, Terraform, and Packer. In the situations where I have a Linux machine already booted up, and sometimes already connected to the Internet, I can make things really easy on myself by slinging these tools in my usual way for repeatable, reproducible machines that may or may not come with the attendant headaches of immutable infrastructure (sorry, Nix, I’m not in love with you, I’m in love with the idea of you).

Check my math - NixOS vs the Most Complicated Program on Earth (MCPOE)

Sun, 14 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Imagine you had the Most Complicated Program On Earth (MCPOE), with 1,000,000 dependencies.

Every dependency must be build correctly exactly right or the MCPOE will fail to compile. MCPOE’s 10x dev team chose their packages so that each dependency has only a 1/1,000,000 chance of having something go wrong when you’re installing them - maybe a whitespace character snuck into the wrong build script, maybe solar wind hit the build computer. What are the chances that you will install MCPOE correctly?

Vagrant lets you wrap VDI images

Tue, 05 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

At work I’m currently experimenting with using Vagrant to automate getting an entire local network of our tiny embedded Linux systems running all on my local box.

Alas! One of our devices uses a custom Yocto distribution! But wait, we have scripts to run these as VDI images, and apparently that’s enough for Vagrant to get to work!

`1`	`vagrant package --base my-virtual-machine`

Further reading materials for future me: Creating a Base Box, and the Box File Format.

Git aliases for fun and profit

Sun, 03 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

haskell-kata’s Quickstart now has this neat little ditty at the start:

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git config --local alias.build '!sh -c \'for file in *.hs; do ghc -o "${file%.hs}-bin" "$file"; done\''
git build

Git is the gift that keeps on giving. I was on the hunt for a subdirectory-scoped alias, and I just discovered this incredibly flexible way to create new Git subcommands.

History: 2 years ago I read through the 1200 page behemoth Haskell Programming from First Principles. (Recommended!) I walked out of that with some 1300 Anki flashcards that I have been chewing through ever since.

A good place to symlink local builds

Sat, 18 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been a big fan of both spaced repetition in general and the Anki spaced repetition system in particular for a long time now. So today, after a fresh new install and blinging out of Ubuntu 23.10, I decided to take the next step, as I often do with programs I use a lot, and try to build and compile it myself.

This turned out to be pretty easy! The docs warn that ./run is slower than the non-optimized build, but I don’t notice much of a difference on my machine. It did however leave me with the question: Where should I put the anki symlink to ./run?