Can't enough be enough?

In this article, I will explain the impact the Datadog IPO and the years that followed it had on me, both financially and psychologically, as transparently as I can. The intention is to examine how such an event can change one's life, either positively or not, and give you some return of experience on the choices that I made.

Measuring the coverage of a rust program in Github Actions

In this article, I will go through how I set up code coverage measurement for bo, my text editor written in Rust, and publicly hosted the coverage report on S3.

Tools I'm thankful for

Software engineers sometimes have a reputation for being overly critical when it comes to tools and programming languages. The web is full of rants, heated debates and articles about what technology is "better" and which is "crap". It was thus refreshing to read an post titled Software I'm thankful for, that shone a light on some pieces of software in a positive light. In honor of this article, I've decided to go through the same exercise.

Sending a webhook from Synology DSM to Discord

Given the fact that running a Datadog agent on a Synology Play NAS is not obvious, I wanted to enable Discord webhooks push notifications (as this is where my Datadog alerts are already being sent). This way, I'd get plenty of alerts "for free" without having to configure new Datadog …

River monitoring with Datadog

Last month, Ardèche experienced very heavy precipitations in the span of couple of hours. As a result, the dam located upriver from me opened the floodgates (literally), which caused the Chassezac level to raise by about 6.5m in about 1.5h. I've setup some monitoring using Datadog and Pagerduty to make sure I know about it as soon as possible.

To the Underdark and back

I've recently designed a 2 session long (6h) detour into the Underdark, that would feed into one of my player's character's backstory. The goal was to allow him to meet his long-disappeared father, while introducing both the players and the characters to the strange and dangerous land that is the Underdark.

Metaprocrastinating on writing a book by writing a text editor

If you have been following my Essential Tools and Practices for the Aspiring Software Developer posts and were anxious to read more, you might have noticed that they stopped coming after a while. I have a draft for the last chapter, and I regularly think about getting back to it, at least to get some closure. Alas, procrastination being what it is, I never did. My procrastination level became really interesting when I convinced myself that one of the reasons that I didn't want to write that final chapter was that my text editor was standing in the way. I was either using a full-fledged code editor (Sublime Text/VSCode) riddled with complex features I didn't need (autocompletion, linting, etc) or getting lost in configuring vim into the perfect markdown editor. Either way, these were the wrong tools for the job, and my only way to get back to writing was to.. write my own?

Cleaning up the Dungeondraft tag list

I have spent quite a lot of time using Dungeondraft recently, as I've designed many homebrewed places and encounters. The more maps I created, the more assets pack I bought from CartographyAssets, to further enrich and improve them. I quickly started to realize that some of these asset packs caused the tag list to be filled with entries that weren't linked to any assets at all. This made the asset discovery process quite frustrating.

Running the Port Nyanzaru Dinosaur Race

When I was preparing for Port Nyanzaru, in Tomb of Annihilation, I started reading what other Dungeons Masters had to say about the city. A lot of them would mention that the dinosaur race was a must-do, and that if done properly, it could really be a high point in the start of the adventure. The problem was, I felt that the official rules regarding this race were, well, underwhelming, to say the least. Each player rolls a dice, gets some points or not, repeatedly until the end of the race. If that race was going to be something to remember, I felt that I needed to spice it up a bit.

Shell productivity tips and tricks

This chapter will walk you through different features of your shell allowing you to do more while typing less, such as autocompletion, keyboard shortcuts, history navigation and shell expansions. Even mastering some of these should make you immensely more productive in your shell day-to-day!