blogsystem5 - Julio Merino (jmmv.dev)

SSH agent forwarding and tmux done right

The SSH agent is a little daemon that holds your private keys in memory. This is particularly handy when your keys are protected by a passphrase: you can unlock and add your keys to the agent once and, from then on, any SSH client such as ssh(1) can interact with the keys without asking you for the passphrase again. The SSH agent becomes even handier when you primarily work on a remote workstation over SSH.

November 17, 2023 · Tags: blogsystem5, unix
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Why do I know shell, and how can you?

“Why do you know so much shell?” is a question I’m getting a lot at work lately. So yeah, why? And how can you learn it too? There is no secret here: I know the shell well because I was “forced” to write tools in it for a while and, because of that, I made a conscious effort to learn the language and get better at it. You see, most people that write shell don’t want to deal with it. They stitch together whatever works into a script and call it a day, making a bunch of spaghetti even if it goes against the coding best practices they already know. And when they encounter some odd syntax they don’t recognize, their reaction is to say “this has to be rewritten in Python!” instead of taking a breath and trying to really understand what’s going on. It doesn’t help that plenty of senior engineers scoff at shell scripts. And it is true: the shell is arcane and has many flaws as a programming language. I don’t want to convince you to start writing new tools in it. But the shell is also an incredible rapid prototyping language, and you can use it to solve business problems really quickly and with surprisingly little code. If you pause for a second to learn it, you’ll realize that you can bend tradition and write maintainable shell code too. Hear out how I got into writing so much shell and how you can get better at it too.

November 10, 2023 · Tags: blogsystem5, personal-story, shell
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End-to-end tool testing with Bazel and shtk

If you use Bazel, your project is of moderate size. And because your project is of moderate size, it almost-certainly builds one or more binaries, at least one of which is a CLI tool. But let’s face it: you don’t have end-to-end testing for those tools, do you? I’m sure you have split the binary’s main function into its own file so that the rest of the tool can be put in a library, and I’m extra-sure that you have unit tests for such library. But… those tests do little to verify the functionality and quality of the tool as experienced by the end user. Consider: What exactly does the tool print to the console on success? Does it show errors nicely when they happen, or does it dump internal stack traces? How does it handle unknown flags or bad arguments? Is the built-in help message nicely rendered when your terminal is really wide? What if the terminal is narrow? You must write end-to-end tests for your tools but, usually, that isn’t easy to do. Until today. Combining shtk with Bazel via the new rules_shtk ruleset makes it trivial to write tests that verify the behavior of your CLI tools—no matter what language they are written in—and in this article I’m going to show you how.

November 4, 2023 · Tags: bazel, blogsystem5, shell, shtk, testing
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Links: October 2023 edition

Inspired by the works of Phil Eaton, I’ve been highlighting articles and projects that I find interesting in Twitter X and Mastodon. Some of these posts were more “successful” than I had expected, which I take to mean that doing this is interesting to you all. So, it’s probably a good idea to periodically collect them all in a post with a very brief commentary on each. Here is a recap of the interesting articles that came my way in October 2023. This does not mean that these articles were published during this period: some of them are older but I just (re)discovered them now. I’ll avoid referencing my own articles: you can find those by in the archive.

October 31, 2023 · Tags: blogsystem5, recap
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BazelCon 2023 et al. trip report

I’m exhausted. I just came back to Seattle from a 10-day trip in which I attended three different Bazel events: the Build Meetup in Reykjavik, the Bazel Community Day in Munich, and BazelCon 2023 in Munich too. Oh, and because I was on the other side of the world, I also paid a visit to my family in Spain. Attending these events has been incredibly useful and productive: I got exposure to many ideas and discussions that would just not happen online, I got to build connections with very interesting people and, of course, it has also been super fun too to reconnect with old coworkers and friends. This article contains the summary of the things I learned and the things I want to follow up on. These are just a bunch of cleaned-up notes which I took and are in the context of my work with Bazel at Snowflake and my interests on build tools, so this is not endorsed by Snowflake.

October 30, 2023 · Tags: bazel, blogsystem5, snowflake
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Hello, Blog System/5!

Blog System/5 is my new Substack publication in which I write about the variety of software and systems engineering topics that pique my interest. If that sounds too generic to you, it’s because it is: there are too many cool things to write about! And yes, this sounds exactly the same as this blog. Read on to understand the motivation behind the new publication and subscribe now to not miss a beat!

October 27, 2023 · Tags: blog, blogsystem5
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Posts: blogsystem5