Editing Time

Despite my day job these past few months being mostly about keeping tabs on projects, people, contracts and whatnot, I’m back to coding on a daily basis after a small hiatus.

I have to thank Anders Borum for a small but significant portion of that, though – I’ve been beta testing his Working Copy app for a fair amount of time now, and it just keeps getting better and better, to the point where I now routinely pull down, review and check in fairly large projects without bothering to fiddle with a lumbering (and usually hot) laptop.

He just added syntax highlighting support to the latest beta, so I’m pretty happy with it for my own stuff as well – in fact, I’ve just finished tweaking a GitHub Pages site that could have been entirely built using it.

On the , I’ve been using Visual Studio Code to work on just about anything from cloud provisioning scripts to projects, and it’s been a treat – much faster and with a nicer UX than most of the current crop of WebKit/-backed editors, and so much so that I’m keeping it open pretty much constantly.

Who would have thought, huh? Well, I’m very happy with it so far, and next week’s release is going to be even better. Only thing missing is an ARM port, but at least I now have a very nice editor that also runs on “regular” if I need it to.

Anyway, it’s not about the editor – it’s about what you do with it, and I’ve been taking mine on a wild ride deep into the wild, wild west of container orchestration tools.

A few days ago, I spent an interesting (but somewhat frustrating) evening getting etcd, the new registry (distribution) and swarm built and nearly running on my Raspberry Pi cluster, with rather mixed results.

About the only thing that worked without any hitches was etcd, since several attempts at building directly on an ARM system failed to deliver a working binary – and yes, I filed an issue.

It’s an uphill struggle. Due to what appear to be bugs with 32 bit ARM support on the compiler, some things only run after moving structure members around to change memory alignment, and other “nice”, “straightforward” issues…

But hey, it’s still a lot of fun.