What does it take to run Concourse? The tl;dr here is that in order to run Concourse for one or more teams, you will need:
Let’s dig into why you need these two types of applications if you choose to run Concourse.
Secrets managers, like Vault, securely store your secrets. Setup correctly, you can trust them to safely store and retrieve your secrets.
Writing Concourse resource-types in bash can be fairly fast, especially if you’re relying on external tools to do some of the heavy lifting for you. I think a lot of us in this space are also use to do writing up quick bash scripts to do things, so writing up a quick and dirty resource-type in bash feels natural. Here are some tips for writing resource-types in bash.
I’m not going to explain how resource-types work in Concourse. I’ll instead refer you to the documentation: resource-types
I’m currently running Concourse for my team at work. It’s a two instance deployment, one web and one worker EC2 instance.
Most of the pipelines we write do stuff that require permissions to various AWS services. We needed to figure out a way to grant permissions to these AWS services to our pipelines.
Our first thought was to create an IAM role and assign that role to the Concourse Worker’s EC2 instance. Done! Every pipeline instantly had the permissions needed.
A request I’ve seen from Concourse users every so often is that they want a way for a Concourse Job to stop what it’s doing and wait for approval from a human. They want what I call a “manual approval” step in their jobs.
A more concrete example that I’ve seen is when users are running terraform apply in their pipelines. They usually end up wanting a Concourse Job that
looks like:
When I got my first mechanical keyboard one of the first thing I did was create
a layer where h,j,k, and l, Vim’s navigation keys, sent their
respective arrow key codes instead. This quickly became one of my favourite key
bindings that I would use everywhere. I’ve continued to code this setup into
any keyboard I can set it up on.
With mechanical keyboards this is easy since most come with great programmable tools out of the box. With the keyboard on my laptop though, and on my work laptop specifically, I’m a bit more limited as to what tools I can use. Installing something like AutoHotkey felt heavy-handed for something so simple. I also didn’t have any ambition to use AutoHotkey for anything else.
I’ve been reading So Good They Can’t Ignore You by Cal Newport. I first heard of this book a few years ago from a podcast and it’s been on my reading list ever since. I’ve entered a soul searching mode recently in regards to my career. I’m trying to figure out where I want my career to go. This is a pretty big question and I’ve been finding the advice in this book pretty good for someone in my position.
I’m reading TDD By Example by Kent Beck right now and one of the Red Bar Patterns really resonated with me. It’s called the Learning Test.
Here’s the scenario. You have a new library or framework that you’re implementing. Instead of just diving into TDD’ing the implementation, you can write some learning tests. These are tests where you validate how you expect the 3rd party tool to work for you. I see this as testing the contract between your application and the 3rd party tool.
Today I learned a little bit more about how pointers work in Go.
We had this object that we want other functions to directly modify. So we pass a pointer to this object to various functions and then in our tests we check to see that the original object has been modified correctly. We also have these helper functions that are supposed to return a pointer to an object buried inside of the struct.
I’m developing my own budgeting app using Go and have been using it to learn new things as well. For testing, because I’m TDD’ing the entire project, I decided to just use the built-in Go testing framework. I use Ginkgo at work and enjoy it, but decided to see what vanilla testing in Go is like.
After writing a bunch of tests for a lot of my boilerplate functions, I quickly had a lot of duplicated set-up code that looked like this at the start of all my tests:
This year, I decided to participate in my company’s halloween contest. My Instagram news feed usually has a few cosplayers on there, and they started inspiring me to try and build a costume of my own. First I thought of dressing as Geralt from the Witcher, since I’m still in the middle of playing Witcher 3. All the sewing and fabric cutting got me a bit nervous though. Then I came across a video of a cosplayer showing how she built armour and she made it look SO easy! Seeing her video I then decided I’d build an armour of some sort and quickly decided on building some Halo armour.