Maksym Prokopov personal blog
Idea is a something worth sharing

Hashicorp Waypoint

11.10.2024
Waypoint is a tool by Hashicorp to manage builds, artifacts and deployments. It has a CLI interface and also a nice UI and uses HCL instead of YAML for configuration and templating. Introduction It might not be needed if you have something like GitHub Actions and may felt redundant, but actually it's a kind of missing piece for having a good UI for CI/CD pipelines, as it gives a handy tool for a developer to streamline build/deploy/release process.
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Languages for purpose

01.09.2024
Recently I’ve invested some time to learn Elm and it’s architecture. Funny, it was made to do Redux with React based programming fun, specifically with types and syntax. Immutability from the beginning. Signals. REPL. Packages. OMG. The tooling is just amaizing! Why the heck we don’t do more of this? This is quite aligned with where nowadays mainstream goes with EcmaScript 2024 and React 18. Look at the state of Javascript.
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Deployment process with Hashicorp Nomad

14.07.2024
As, probably, many of you, I did a long journey from manual FTP sync, to semi-automated tools like Capistrano, then manually managed docker deployments, then anisble managed docker containers and finally, met the orchestration system of choice - Hashicorp Nomad. TLDR: Kubernetes is too heavy for my moderate needs. Hashicorp Nomad strikes the right balance between features and maintenance complexity. At some point in time I felt a need for better container orchestration system that I could run by myself in Hetzner.
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Sustainable Ruby on Rails in 2024

30.06.2024
Rubu on Rails development changes a lot every year and sometimes it's not easy to keep up with the changes. I've recently bought Sustainable Rails Book and it's hard to overestimate how valuable is it for me. Here are couple of thoughts after reading first chapters. Invest in developer friendly application bootstrap process. Running bin/setup and bin/dev should be enough to run on the new blank developer machine. Move business logic out of fat controllers and fat models.
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Emacs For Beginners

10.06.2024

The article provides overview of facts why Emacs is so different but also so powerful comparing to other editors. It gives a good starting point for the reader to understand the fundamentals and start own journey to effective work.

The way of learning is painful, but rewarding. The essense of Emacs is to codify your specific repetitive tasks so that eventually you realize, the editor contains a lot of customizations speeding up your daily routines, as no other editor does.

I do the following things in Emacs:

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Use LLM to automate Amazon purchase categorization

01.04.2024

Used Mistral-7b LLM to map my Amazon purchases to my home ledger accounts.

It worked surprisingly well!

Definitely worth integrating into accounting automation routines.

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Run Large Language Model on your PC in 5 minutes

28.03.2024
Run Large Language Model on your PC in 5 minutes For the summary I used model whisper to extract text from audio of this video and asked mistral to summarize it. echo "this is a transcript of the video. Summarize this\n $(cat subtitles.txt)" | ollama run gemma:7b So, here you go, output from mistral 7b: The speaker explains how to download, install, and set up LLMA, and then demonstrates how to use it to run a specific model called “mistrial” with a pirate-themed prompt.
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Ansible Use Cases

27.03.2024
While Ansible is a great tool for certain use cases, such as building new AMIs when used with Packer, it has some downsides. These become apparent when using it for container orchestration (which I have witnessed at scale) or keeping the configuration of a set of nodes in sync. Another significant, though not dramatic, downside is related to Python version and dependency management. This adds extra complexity that I would prefer to avoid in a system management tool.
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Compliance as a Code

27.03.2024
Recently, I stumbled upon a concept that sounded new to me: Compliance as a Code. The core idea is to “embed compliance policies into the code that can be repeated and tested automatically.” But what does it mean in practice? For example, consider PCI DSS, which requires measures to secure credit card information to ensure compliance. Tools like Terraform, Ansible, and others should contain the code for encryption, access control, and data obfuscation.
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Palettro - VSCode like command palette in any macOS application

26.03.2024
Short video with overview of Palettro, small utility that brings VSCode like navigation to any macOS application to boost your productivity.