Hi! I’m Vlad GURDIGA. 👋🙂

It’s good to have you here. Here I’m writing mostly on thechical subjects, like UNIXy stuff, vim, and GNU make, but I also touch on productivity and personal development.

Make a bot list from access.log and use it

The other day, after playing a bit with GoAccess I found that the numbers didn’t add up with my in-app tracking, and I decided to take a slice of access.log and eyeball it to see what’s going on. What I found was discouraging: lots an lots of bot and crawler requests. As disappointing as it was, it was still good to find this out and adjust my perception to reality.

My simple meditation routine

My current meditation practice is a sort of mindfulness meditation: it’s intended as a way of training attention, focus, and self-awareness.

Project-based learning

Recently I was discussing with a friend that was thinking about developing some programming skills.

Google Apps Script

For a while, I was collecting the DMARC reports, just in case I can find something useful in them. I didn’t, but I liked the lil script that I wrote in this Apps Script from Google. It’s like VBA for Microsoft Office — if you ever heard of it. If not, it’s automation for Google apps and services.

moreutils ifne run function

There is this lil program in moreutils called ifne. I use it in shell pipelines, to execute a given command when there is some output. A quick example:

Simple log aggregation for Docker containers

The Why

The Docker composition on one of my side projects has recently got to 6 containers: SMTP-in, SMTP-out, app, subscription, website, and certbot. Since I have deployed a 0.1.0 version to DigitalOcean a couple of weeks ago, I caught myself feeling increasingly anxious about losing logs every time I deployed a new version of the container.

An easy TDD exercise and some more

A couple of months ago I’ve set out to write a lil RSS-checking program that I thought would be useful for a friend. As a small green-field project, I thought it’s going to be perfect to — once again — try that hippy TDD method that everyone was talking about 10 years ago. In retrospect, a few things came in really handy while writing this program, and wanted to share them.