I’ve written a script to aid in merge proposals done with Launchpad. Simply run the command with the url of the merge proposal as the argument and the script will

In the last couple of weeks I have been taking a bit of time here and there to explore LXD. LXD is a tool for managing system containers. As both LXD and Docker deal with containers in many ways there is quite a bit of overlap but LXD is aiming for full isolated system containers where Docker is more focused on application containers. You can even run Docker within an LXD image. I find it helpful to think of LXD as a replacement for virtual machines.

The primary advantages of containers are realized when they are treated as the cattle of computing not pets. There are many articles using that analogy to extol the advantages of containers as cattle or even as chickens. However I have been recently rebuilding my Ubuntu Desktop and found containers can at times be great for pets also, most particularly the messy ones.

I like static generated sites, simple, effective and secure. I love github pages as it gets the job done easily and well. Jekyll is a natural fit with github pages and was a great way to start building a blog. However recently Hugo has caught my attention.

I decided to switch to Hugo for a few different reasons:

• I like the clean directory layout better with Hugo.

• I want disqus, rss, tags, some easy social sharing links and google analytics. All of that is possible with Jekyll but some of these are much easier to setup with Hugo.

Vagrant is awesome!

Given its much deserved popularity this won’t surprise many. This isn’t even new, I’ve used it daily for quite awhile. Recently while discussing use cases where Vagrant was an awesome fit I found myself wondering just why is it such a great tool?

The best tools are those that reflect a deep understanding of the use cases and paradigms they are made for. Vagrant is actually quite simple, roughly it just ties together some pre-built vms with the appropriate providers and configuration management tool. The key is that it does so cleanly without adding baggage to the process.

Another aspect that is important is that Vagrant chooses sane defaults but still allows configurability. The sane defaults combined with the clean design mean that more often than not Vagrant makes building vm based environments far easier than any other way. This is probably what I love most about Vagrant, I can turn around a clustered dev environment in under 5 minutes and even share it with my team with no extra work. This is orders of magnitude faster than other solutions.