All posts by Oliver Radwell

5 Foolproof Pointers to Achieve Perfect Sourdough Bread

Baking,

Would you like to bake the perfect sourdough bread? Is your bread not getting enough rise? Are you not seeing the ‘ear’ on your bread? This post will get you there!

Pointers

1. Use water to achieve steam

If you’re a home baker you’re unlikely to own an oven with steam functionality. In that case you should put a tray of water in the oven to achieve steam. Steam slows crust from forming and helps bread to rise. You’ll need to take the water tray out mid-way to let the crust go golden brown.

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What’s the best Kubernetes distribution for local environments?

System Administration, Technology

There are plenty of Kubernetes distributions available that can be used to install Kubernetes locally. They tend to use minimal resources which is ideal. Question is what’s the best Kubernetes distribution for local use?

Local Kubernetes Distributions

This post contains benchmarks and reviews of the following Kubernetes distributions:

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How I passed Certified Kubernetes Administrator exam

Technology

I started working with Kubernetes in 2018 (about 3 years ago). In 2019, I successfully migrated a production application into an AWS Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) cluster. I’ve been managing that cluster for more than 2 years. All this made me confident that it would be easy for me to pass Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA) exam.

Certified Kubernetes Administrator logo
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Easy Backups to Google Drive on Linux

System Administration, , ,

I’ve recently set up automated backups to Google Drive on my CentOS 7 Linux VPS to protect my blog posts from data loss. I don’t know why it took so long for me to care about backups of my own data. I chose to back up to Google Drive since I already have a Google One plan that has plenty of available storage space.

Screenshot from Google Drive showing 4 compressed files backed up in rclone/backup folder
Four compressed files backed up in a Google Drive folder
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Single-node Kubernetes on Raspberry Pi

System Administration, Technology,

I’ve recently got a Raspberry Pi 4 Model B 8GB. I wanted to have one just to try running Kubernetes on Raspberry Pi. Most resources on the web seem to be for a huge cluster with a dozen nodes but I wanted to do it with a single node.

Picture of raspberry pi 4 with black case running
Raspberry Pi 4 Model B in its case

Operating system

As the operating system I chose  Ubuntu because of its Pi support even though I prefer Red Hat based distros.

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Cheap & durable keyboard & mouse set by Logitech

Technology, , ,

As a programmer I care about the keyboard and mouse I use whilst working. I’ve been a fan of Logitech since I was a teenager. I loved Logitech GT27 steering wheel, their mice, and keyboards which I used when I was younger. I guess I have a bit of a bias on Logitech products. Read my review to decide whether my bias shows.

I’ve been using Logitech K270 keyboard and Anywhere MX mouse for 9 years. I’ve bought the first keyboard and mouse set in 2012 (9 years before this post) and got a second pair in 2016 (5 years before this post). I use one of the pairs for home and one for the office.

Logitech K270 keyboard

Logitech K270
Logitech K270 after years of use

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Wholemeal Sourdough Bread Recipe

Baking, ,

Like everyone, when the Coronavirus lockdown started, I followed the trend and started making bread. I’ve been baking sourdough bread almost every weekend for more than a year. One of the main reasons I chose to make sourdough bread is that it doesn’t need any yeast. Most sourdough bread uses white bread flour but I prefer to have more wholemeal flour in it. This blog post is to share my wholemeal sourdough bread recipe.

Top view of the wholemeal sourdough bread baked using this recipe.
Wholemeal Sourdough Bread
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PHP Dos and Don’ts aka Programmers I Don’t Like

Programming, ,
I will find you meme - Taken (2008)

I am sure every PHP developer has a colleague they hate because he/she coded the application they started maintaining. This is mostly because the code is old. New standards become common, they learn what they used to do was inefficient, unreadable, or complicated. As PHP is a language that changed significantly over the years, code written a few years ago will certainly look outdated.

That being said, this post is not about the old PHP code. This post shows how to be a bad programmer even when following standards. Please don’t be this person.

  1. Too many nested if statements
  2. Extra brackets and braces
  3. Unnecessary casting
  4. Useless checks
  5. Slow PHP built-in functions
  6. Long functions
  7. Too many function arguments
  8. Long lines
  9. Long if-else blocks
  10. Wrong function / class name casing
  11. Lack of coding standards

Too many nested if statements

This is probably the one I hate the most. It also makes the lines too long because of the indentation caused by each of the nested if statements.

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