September 20, 2021
After having renewed the Google Associate Cloud Engineer certification, it was the moment to renew the Google Professional Cloud Architect certification as well.
Since I wanted to keep Windows on my laptop for the smallest amount of time possible, I decided to book the Professional Cloud Architect exam the day after the Associate Cloud Engineer one.
On the exam day (18th of August), having had experience the previous day, I ensured to set up everything correctly.
As I did the previous day, I decided to use my Lenovo Bluetooth Laser Mouse.
The exam started without any hiccups at 15:00.
At around 15:30, I moved the mouse wheel to the left, triggering a “back” signal, equivalent to press the “back” button in a browser.
Kryterion Sentinel decided that the proper way to handle such a signal was to interrupt the exam.
I tried to call the Kriterion call centers, but a recorded voice informed me that the fastest way to access their customer care was via chat.
I opened a chat with their support and got put in a queue of about 20 people.
After 40 minutes, I managed to chat with a support representative, and they managed to schedule a new exam session for me a couple of minutes later (16:15).
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August 25, 2021
A couple of years ago, I obtained the Google Associate Cloud Engineer certification, so it was re-certification time.
Since it is August and probably also due to the whole ongoing health situation, I’ve not found any test center at a reasonable distance.
Therefore, I’ve decided to use the Online Proctored option.
Google relies on Kryterion for their exams, as many other companies do, since Kryterion has more than 1100 associated test centers and, at least in the ICT certification space, it’s one of the most commonly used networks.
Having had experience with Red Hat remote certifications, I was expecting at least the same level of user experience with Kryterion.
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July 28, 2021
A few years ago, I wrote a blog post on managing CORS headers with Negroni.
Lately, I’ve created a new API server that needed to be accessible from the browser, but this time I used a different technology, more precisely gRPC-Gateway.
Few months after I wrote that blog post, I stopped writing new REST services by hand.
I did not rewrite all the services that used the old paradigm just because they needed a fix or a new feature, but for all new services, I moved to gRPC with gRPC-Gateway.
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June 28, 2021
Few months ago I posted a library for sensible int scale for Gonum Plot.
There is a similar package I’ve developed to handle timescales.
The integer one, being based on a recursive function, works with any number scale.
Differently, this one will only work well with a timescale between 2 days and a couple of years.
Extending it is not hard since it’s enough to add additional case statements in the switch, but I’ve not found use-cases for different timeframes so far.
If you add additional options, please commit them back!
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May 31, 2021
Three years passed from the moment the GDPR become binding law in the European Union.
On the one hand, I’m happy that it has already been three years, but on the other hand, I’m impatient to see GDPR fully applied.
Cookies
Cookies are always a hot theme when we talk about GDPR.
I still see websites handing out cookies (first and third parties ones) without a cookie banner or to users who have not pressed the “accept” button on the cookie banner.
Also, speaking about cookie banners, the majority are not compliant since they often make it hard to refuse cookies or pre-select cookie acceptance.
This situation is unfortunate, but we see some movement on this (like the noyb initiative).
If those initiatives continue, as I hope, next year, the cookie situation will be much better!
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April 29, 2021
For many years now, I’ve been using immutable versions of Fedora.
I remember that I started to play with immutable Fedora back in 2015 when Fedora Atomic was new.
I liked the idea since the first time I’ve read about it, but in the beginning, I did not spend too much time making it work on my setup because it seemed a little bit too complex.
At DevConf.cz 2016, I met Patrick Uiterwijk, who was running his spin of Fedora Atomic.
We had a long chat on it, and he explained to me his workflow.
Soon after, I started to use an immutable version of Fedora on my personal laptop, but I was not daring to use it on my work laptop.
When I left Red Hat at the end of 2017, my personal laptop became my only laptop for a little while, and the immutable Fedora became my only OS.
Since then, I’ve been using only immutable Fedora on my computers.
In June 2020, I took the time to clean up my build process and files, and I moved all the needed bits to a new git repo that is now openly available and can be found here.
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March 31, 2021
Late last year, I’ve read that a new Ansible-related exam was available: the Red Hat Certified Specialist in Services Management and Automation exam (EX358).
I’ve taken and passed this exam at the end of January.
It was the first time I did a Red Hat exam that was brand new and without having the possibility of finding online some opinions around it.
Some people have reported for other exams that when new exams are launched, the scoring has issues.
I’ve not noticed such an issue with this exam, so I was pleased about it.
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February 1, 2021
In my pursuit of the Red Hat Certified Architect (RHCA) certification, I’ve taken the Red Hat Certified Specialist in Advanced automation: Ansible best practices exam (EX447).
As for the other Ansible Exams, you can always consult the Ansible documentation available offline in the exam system.
Different from the Red Hat Certified Engineer exam (EX294), this exam also includes Ansible Tower as a topic, so be sure to have good knowledge of it as well!
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January 20, 2021
Over the years, I found myself multiple times using Gonum Plot.
I do find it as a very good and easy to use plotting tool for Go.
The problem I found myself, over and over, dealing with is the tickers scale.
If you know before-hand the values that can be expected to be created by the application, it is very straightforward, but the majority of times, this is not the case.
I often find myself creating a plotting application on data that track events that have not yet happened and cannot predict their range.
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December 28, 2020
At the beginning of this month, I took the EX294 exam, which allowed me to obtain the Red Hat Certified Engineer (RHCE) certification.
It was the first time I attempted the RHCE exam, but I prepared myself in the past for the EX300 exam, the exam that allowed you to obtain the RHCE certification in the RHEL7 time, but never got around to do the exam.
Compared to what I had to study for the EX300, I found the EX294 program way more sensible.
An aspect I’ve never liked about the EX300 was that you needed to learn many implementation details, such as the in-scope applications’ configuration format.
EX294 changed this aspect since it is based on Ansible, and Ansible abstracts the majority of implementation details of the various applications.
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(Fabio Alessandro Locati|Fale)'s blog