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How good is Pop!_OS in 2020?

Post author:Eric VanWieren
Post published:October 10, 2020
Post category:Coding / General / Linux
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I have been using MX_linux, and while I think the premise behind it is good, the implementation falls a bit flat. As someone that has used Linux for years, I was avoiding using my small and light laptop because I did not want to deal with the system that was running it. That is not a good sign. So, I decided that I was going to install a new Linux distro on my system and get back to writing and doing things. Out of curiosity I dropped in to distrowatch to see what the flavor of the month was currently. To my surprise I saw MX_Linux…

Trying to Help Other Learn Programming

Post author:Eric VanWieren
Post published:May 12, 2020
Post category:Coding / General / Python
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Having worked in the industry for a very long time, sometimes I forget how much I have learned (and forgotten) over the years. What seems trivial now, was once a complex idea that I had to wrap my head around, and after learning the fundamentals, there always seemed to be more to learn. This was at, in my mind, a golden age for learning computer systems and how to code. Installing Linux was not what it is today with flashing installers and disk configurators. Heck, X-windows did not start by default and you had to fiddle with configuration setting for ages to get a gui environment…

Should I stop work on CfnMason or any project?

Post author:Eric VanWieren
Post published:April 19, 2020
Post category:AWS / Coding / Python
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Off and on for years, and at various companies, I have developed various tools to manage complex AWS CloudFormation templates and stacks. This came out of the lack of tooling that was associated with CloudFormation itself. It was not that CFN was bad, (it is notoriously picky) it is just that it was designed with the intention of being a way to treat your infrastructure in code based manner. That is really not true. CFN was created as a templating language with defined spec. Because of these limitations, I have built closed and open source solutions to manage the complexities that involve working with CloudFormation. Recently…

How to configure environment for Python Poetry based project.

Post author:Eric VanWieren
Post published:December 25, 2019
Post category:Coding / Python
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How do I get started? I recently switched over to Poetry as a package manager for my project CfnMason. ( CfnMason is a tool related to CloudFormation stack management, but you can read about that on the Readme as it is updated. ) The question is, how do you use Poetry when you are working on a project across multiple machines and operating systems. I guess I am going to attempt to address the issue. So, you want to join a project, or work on a project that is using the Poetry dependency management tool. Great! But, how do you get the requirements setup for the…

Setting up the cfnmason project for Python

Post author:Eric VanWieren
Post published:November 24, 2019
Post category:Automation / AWS / Coding / DevOps / Python
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Cfnmason is yet another tool that can be used to manipulate cloudformation stacks. It is not designed to be a replacement for CloudFormation like Terraform, but as a means of making building and managing them easier. I had written a version of this ages ago in Ruby, but with most of my work now being in Python, I am creating a new version in Python. As I have never created an exportable Python package, this will track the process of building and releasing a new PyPi package. Oh, and to keep things interesting, I am doing this on a mix of Windows 10 and Linux. Creating…