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.

Lua is a pretty good config language

Tue, 06 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Lua and Scheme occupy curiously similar places in my noggin, becuase my primary use case for both has been as scripting languages embedded into other, larger projects. Lua of course is basically designed for this job, but it’s a solid intermediate format to target even if you have no immediate intentions to use the programming language parts at all. A TSV file like

1
2

10.0.0.5  192.168.1.1 80  tcp
10.0.0.6  192.168.1l.1  443 tcp

can be given a lot more structure on the cheap by writing a small transpiler of sorts to turn it into

Configuration-as-Code on Andrew Quinn's TILs

I still like Jenkins

Lua is a pretty good config language