Advanced customization for Antora - PlantUML support & custom UI

This post will cover some slightly advanced steps for building a multi-repository Asciidoc documentation using Antora. My previous post blog.anoff.io/2019-02-15-antora-first-steps covered basics of Antora and how to migrate existing AsciiDoc files. In this post I will go through the steps of including content from another repository, building a custom UI and adding plantUML support to the (automated, dockerized) build.

plantUML support

One of the most important things for me when it comes to software docs is the ability to show relationships and interactions using diagrams. As you might know from my previous posts I am a huge plantUML fan. So plantUML support is important both for rendering the Antora website and the local development.

Continuous Vitae - Auto built and git versioned CV

Versioning your CV is important. One traditional approach is to date it whenever you send it out. I chose to present my CV on my website and host it on GitHub. In this blog post I want to explain how I set up continuous integration pipeline for building my CV that automatically injects a unique version into each build. This method is applicable for anyone choosing to ascii-based CV - in my case LaTeX. You also need some basic knowledge of git, Docker and CI services like Drone.

Hosting Gitea and Drone with Docker

This post will walk you through setting up a self hosted git based continuous integration environment on a two machine setup - assuming you already have two virtual machines at your disposal. Using Gitea* for git hosting and contribution management and Drone for docker-based build jobs, this will guide you through creating docker-compose* files as well as configuring the individual services and getting SSL certificates via traefik. Docker and docker-compose knowledge is required for this tutorial. It mostly focuses on the correct configuration of all the services at play here and not explaining their basic functionality.

Configure Azure Active Directory as Authentication Provider for Gitea

Gitea is an open source git hosting platform, written in Go forked from the Gogs project and seems to be highly inspired by GitHub. If you want to host your own git platform and want to use Azure Active Directory as an authentication provider - this post might help you.

Get Hugo to render (nice) Asciidocs

While migrating my blog from Jekyll to Hugo I went down quite a rabbit hole. While setup and migration to Hugo was a breeze, I spent a lot of time making my .adoc formatted post work with the new blog. After working through several GitHub issues I ended up manipulating the DOM with Javascript to get admonitions working. It still doesn’t feel right - but hey it works! 🤷‍♂️ This post will cover the steps I took in case I myself or anyone out there ever needs to do this again.

Converting existing AsciiDoc into an Antora project

After 2 years of working with the arc42 template in markdown, I spent the last few weeks learning about an asciidoc based site generator named Antora. The main reason for the interest in AsciiDoc was the fact that the limited feature set in markdown often impairs you while writing down complex things. But I had one problem; most of our documentation is scattered across multiple repositories as we try to keep the docs as close to the code as possible. That is why this series will cover how to get a multi repository (software) architecture template up and running using Antora.

What I learned about Management and Recruiting

As [promised]({{ site.baseurl }}/2019-01-15-book-2018-in-books) my book series will start with two books out of the FAANG league. The book How Google works covers many aspects of the companies culture. The book has lots of management insights that - at the time of reading - were of little interest to me. Therefore I want to briefly highlight a few points about innovation that I find fascinating and then move to the human factors like recruiting and competence management that are also covered extensively in the book.

My year 2018 in books

For the last ~15 months I spent a lot of wasted time (commuting to work, waiting at the doctors, sitting on planes) with audio books. I have never been a big reader and the entry barrier to start listening to a book instead of music is a lot lower than packing books, reading instead of listening etc. That’s why I became a really big fan of listening to various audiobooks.

Get the most out of hackathons

End of October I joined the Stuttgart Hackathon for the second time. It was my overall 4th public Hackathon. In this blog post I want to tell you why I enjoy doing Hackathons and why you should join one too if you have the chance!

TL;DR; Network and play with expensive toys

RBAC with Google Firestore

This post will explain how to implement role based access control (RBAC) using the Google Firestore serverless database. Firebase and Firestore in particular with the concept presented in this post offers the most seamless integration of serverless infrastructure with a mobile client at this point. It has become my go to backend for all minor web apps I build.

Markdown native diagrams with PlantUML

This post covers PlantUML basics and how it can be used in GitLab or GitHub projects as well as a seamless local development environment using Visual Studio Code. I have been wanting to write this post for months. Lately I have been using PlantUML extensively at work but also in my private projects. You can see it being used in my plantbuddy and techradar projects on GitHub. Using it in different places and for various purposes I came across a bunch of issues that I want to share in this post.

Building realtime apps with Vue and nodeJS

Wanting to build a simple SPA as a side project I struggled with things that might annoy a lot of newcomers that do not want to go full vanilla. Which web framework, which style library, which server framework - and more importantly how does it all work together?

In this post we will put together a bunch of great tools out there to build a realtime web app with a few single lines of code. A quick introduction into the tools that will be used:

GitLab CI/CD for GitHub

When creating a git project that you want to share with others you traditionally had the choice between GitHub with its huge community and tons of integrations, GitLab with a great overall dev experience from issues to one of the best CI/CD solutions out there and BitBucket being one of the friends you have since kindergarten. My personal decision was to host all my personal projects on 🦑 GitHub. For projects that need CI/CD I tinkered around with 👷‍ Travis CI and 🅾️ Circle CI on top of GitHub.

Automated dev workflow for using Data Science VM on Azure

tl;dr; I put together a bunch of scripts on Github that let you deploy a VM from your command line as well as sync code from your local directory to the VM easily to be able to use local IDE and git but execute on the powerful remote machine. Perfect for Data Science applications based around jupyter notebook.

In my previous blog post I explained how to do Terraform deployment of an Azure Data Science Virtual Machine.