The Weekly Notes, bringing you a short commentary about the tech world. This week, my own Hugo Wercker build step, the Raspberry Pi Zero, and some thoughts about certification.
10.000 steps taken
As I’ve mentioned before, this site is a static site that is generated using Hugo. Hugo is a great static site generator and, as I like automating things, at the start of the year I released a Wercker step for building Hugo sites. Posting about this on the Hugo forum then quickly led to the request to add this to the official documentation as a tutorial.
So, why am I writing about this again, almost a year later? First to let you know that in that year there has been quite a bit of development on this, not just by me but there have been a number of pull requests containing new features, improvements, and bug fixes as well. The latest feature that it supports, added this week, is the ability to not just use a released version of Hugo, but to use the very latest unstable version1. Other features added since the original release include support for Pygments[^pygments], dev branches, and separate configuration files. All in all, I think it’s had some great improvements and I’m really happy with the project. If you haven’t looked at any of the new features lately, go have a look and see if they are useful to you.
The other reason I’m bringing this project up now is that when I released my latest version I noticed the step has been used over 10.000 times! And no, that is not mostly by me. Compared to some projects that probably isn’t a lot, but for me it makes it the biggest open source project I’ve ever released. I’m honestly amazed and happy by how popular it has proven to be, and in fact it’s one of the more popular steps within Wercker2.
$5.00 for a computer
Raspberry Pi announced their latest computer, the Raspberry Pi Zero. The most important part about it? It costs only $5.00. And the specs aren’t exactly bad either. It’s quite amazing how much they managed to pack into this tiny machine.
While the previous versions of the Pi were already cheap, this price is as they say comparable to a cup of (expensive) coffee. I don’t know about you, but I didn’t think something like this would be possible anytime soon. Sure, the chips are becoming cheaper all the time, but to pack so much into is quite amazing.
At the moment their supply is obviously constrained, and having it shipped to Australia will probably multiply the costs3, but I’m still interested in picking up a couple just to play around with.
Certifications
Last week I finally got off my lazy bum and sat for the AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate4 exam. I’ve been working on AWS things for over 3 years, yet I never bothered to get any certifications for it before even though there are actual good reasons for getting it. In part this is because I never really believed in the value of certifications. Partially this is because most certifications have come to me fairly easily5, but it’s also because there are so many that don’t mean much.
That said, there are many more certifications around that offer a real world value than I really wanted to admit to myself. Of course, I’m not saying that all of these are actually of benefit to everyone. I don’t believe there is any one certification that everyone should get, but that doesn’t mean it’s not useful to get one or more for yourself. If you intend to work with a certain technology though it’s probably worth looking into what kind of certifications are possible. This can be as broad as a programming language, or more focused like a specific framework or application.
Most importantly though, and that’s really the thing I want to say here, is that you should always be learning something whether you get a certificate at the end or not. This has always been my feeling, and it’s one reason I’ve always tried my best to help others learn things. It doesn’t matter what you are trying to learn, whether it’s cooking, a new language, or something more related to the kind of work you would love to do. It will always stretch your mind in new directions and that can only be a good thing.
As for my AWS exam last week, I passed it of course6. In case you come across this at a time when you’re thinking about doing an AWS exam yourself, the sources that I found most useful for studying were CloudAcademy (using that link will give you 10% off your first invoice7) and A Cloud Guru. CloudAcademy has many video courses, workshops, and practice questions that are useful, while A Cloud Guru has a good video course specifically for the certification that covered things most other courses skipped.
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Personally I would recommend against using it unless you really need a feature that hasn’t been released yet. While I believe Hugo’s master branch is generally stable, that doesn’t mean it won’t be broken or introduce backwards incompatible code. ↩︎
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To be fair, 10.000 uses is nothing compared to the steps like npm install or Slack notifications. Still, it’s firmly in the top 50 steps when you organize them by usage. ↩︎
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When it comes to ordering things online there are definite disadvantages to living in the middle of nowhere (globally speaking). ↩︎
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Such a long and unwieldy name that I can’t even find a good abbreviation for it ↩︎
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An unfortunate example of something that did take a lot of effort for me is my driver’s license which took far too long and cost me way too many euros. I’ve never enjoyed driving, and I can’t wait for self-driving electric cars. ↩︎
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Would I be writing about it here if I hadn’t? ↩︎
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Yes, obviously I also get a discount if you use this link. ↩︎