Kevin Gimbel – DevOps Engineer

Category: Coding

  • Setting up a MacBook from scratch for the first time in 8 years

    Oh boy, did I not think about a lot of stuf… For the past 8 or so years I’ve always used my work MacBook for all things dev, including private development. I’ve spent a lot of time setting up and changing my zsh, and later fish, configs, configuring iTerm, trying out different themes, … you […]

  • Unpinned dependencies just broke my plugin

    Hello and welcome to a little recap! My 11ty MermaidJS plugin was just broken by MermaidJS release 10.0 because they no longer provided a minified JavaScript bundle and instead only provide a ESM module. My plugin was referencing https://unpkg.com/mermaid/dist/mermaid.min.js by default for including the javascript code, but with version 10 this now leads to a […]

  • TIL: One-line list manipulation in Python

    In Python there’s a one-line syntax for iterating over elements of a list. I’ve always found it looked kind-of odd, and as I need to look it up all the time I decided to write a little TIL on this blog about it. There are more powerful one-liners documented on the Python Wiki.

  • Publishing and building a static website on GitHub Pages

    A week ago or so I finally launched a small website I’ve been working on for quite some time: kevin.gimbel.dev/ops – it’s a colourful static website showing some of the technologies I’ve worked with in the past years since I began doing DevOps full time. The website is built with 11ty and published with GitHub […]

  • How to extend and reuse configs in Gitlab CI

    When I began using Gitlab CI the first thing I wanted to know was how to reuse configs. I know that we’ll have changing requirements at work and that we’ll have hundreds of repositories using basically-the-same configurations so I wanted to make sure we’d have a central place to make changes to these. I found […]

  • TIL: Replace git URLs in Gitlab CI

    When working with Gitlab as a storage for Terraform or Ansible modules you probably access them using SSH, like git@gitlab.instance:group/project.git. This has the advantage that authentication is done using SSH keys and everybody on your team can access the repositories just like they’d do when cloning on the terminal – no need for entering passwords during […]

  • Proxy websocket connections with Apache2

    How to configure Apache2 to pass through web socket connections Recently I had to adjust an Apache Virtual Host to allow proxying of Web Socket requests to a service running on localhost which would also accept HTTP requests on the same port. The problem The service in question was Loki, the “Prometheus, but for logs” from Grafana. At Synoa we’ve […]

  • Validating variables in terraform

    Finally, terraform can validate input variables! With the 0.13 release terraform introduces input validation, and with the 1.0.0 releases it was stabilized! Before there was no way of validating variables other than checking their length or doing basic checks inside the code, for example in the locals.tf file, and errors with variables mostly came to light during […]

  • Darken and Lighten colors with CSS

    Recreating SASS darken() & lighten() function with CSS variables and calc The technique shown in this post uses the hsl color format in combination with the calc CSS function to calculate darker or lighter shades of a base color. Before we get into the code I want to make sure I did not come up with this, I found the […]

  • Wildcards in Prometheus queries

    Learn how to query data in Prometheus and how to use wildcards Hello and welcome to this “snippet-sized” post about Prometheus queries! Prometheus is a time-series database which means it is build to collect a lot of datasets that show values over time, for example the result of a HTTP request or the RAM usage of a […]