Finnian's blog

Software Engineer based in New Zealand

DockerCon 2017 - highlights & experiences

Check out what I got up to at DockerCon17, including my Docker load monitor which I did a demo of in my presentation as well as my top moments of the week.

6-Minute Read

So, DockerCon! It turns out that building cool stuff gets you places. Back in 2016, I built a Docker Swarm from 5 Raspberry Pis by following Captain Alex Ellis’ tutorial and then went on to create two different visualisations for the swarm to demonstrate real time load balancing. This was picked up by Alex who got in touch soon after with the amazing news that Docker wanted to invite me to DockerCon17 in Austin, TX! I was incredibly excited about the prospect and asked if I would be able to give…

TweetDock at DockerCon

For the DockerCon17 museum, I created TweetDock - a visualiser monitoring #DockerCon, made with Docker and Raspberry Pi. Find out how I made it and more!

3-Minute Read

A couple of weeks before DockerCon 2017, Victor Coisne asked me whether I would like to create a demo for the DockerCon museum. Having built a hardware gauge with two dials already, it wasn’t going to be very hard to build another! This time, instead of showing load on a swarm, I hooked the dials up to the Twitter Search API to monitor the usage of #DockerCon on Twitter in real time. This was a really fun and quick project to build as I already knew how to make all the hardware. The code is very…

How and why I migrated from Wordpress to Ghost

Learn how I immigrated from WP to Ghost, how I dealt with SEO, old links and other problems and which tools I used.

3-Minute Read

To be honest, it wasn’t Wordpress that was the issue. Having all my content spread across the web wasn’t really working very well anymore so I decided to take the plunge and migrate fxapi.co.uk to finnian.io/blog. To start with, I thought I’d just move the entire site to it’s new home on my server but I ended up changing my mind entirely and started using Ghost.

My programming story... so far

Find out how I went from learning to program with a Raspberry Pi to deploying distributed apps & services on servers in different locations!

9-Minute Read

When I was 12, I was given a Raspberry Pi. For the first couple of days, it was really fun. After I had browsed the web for a while and played a bit of Minecraft, it sat in it’s box for a few months. I really had no idea what to do with it. That was until I discovered that I could build a website with it.

How does my stuff work?

See how I deploy my code to squeeze as much performance out of them as possible using technologies like Nginx, Docker and Node.js.

4-Minute Read

I have a bit of a complex set up with all my sites and services, mainly due to using a multitude of different tools and languages to deploy different things. Currently, I have one main OVH server which most of my stuff is hosted on, including different database engines, Node.js and PHP apps.

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