DevOps

Last year, I needed to move my services to a new Linux VPS. Previously, I used a mess of bash scripts to configure my server, with an aim of version-controlling the configuration. Whilst this was a good idea in theory, in practice this was incredibly complicated and brittle. I now use Ansible to provision my VPS and my Raspberry Pi.

My website was hit by a DDoS from an abusive scraper a few weeks ago. I wrote a Python script to help identify the subnets involved and then an Ansible role to block them using ipset. Here’s a quick blog post to share this.

From the 3rd to the 5th of April, ContentDB was hit by a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack, where it received over 5 million requests from 2,200 IP addresses. This blog post shares statistics on the attack and a reflection on how this can be prevented in the future.

I’m currently learning React Native and Expo as an alternative to native app development. To do this, I’ve been working on an app so that I can get hands-on experience with React Native app development. This includes end-to-end UI testing, using Detox.

I was surprised that Detox doesn’t have an API to interact with permissions. The device.launchApp function does have a permissions field, but this only works on iOS and runs on app start-up - it doesn’t allow you to test the actual user flow.

In this article, I will explain how you can do end-to-end testing with Android permissions, including simulating user interaction with the Android permission request modal.

Last month, ContentDB received a large spike in traffic. ContentDB is the website I created that allows you to install mods/games/texture packs from within Minetest’s main menu. On Saturday 5th, Bobicraft, a Spanish-language Youtube channel with 5M subscribers, posted a video about Minetest. At the time of writing, it has reached 1.3 million views and is now the most-watched Minetest video.

In this article, I will show the data about this increase in traffic. As the tools that I use to monitor ContentDB are ephemeral, this will keep the data around for future reference.

In 2018, I had the opportunity to create a web app for University coursework, as a solo project. I chose to create a package repository for Luanti, an open-source project I help maintain.

Luanti (formerly Minetest) is an open-source game engine with millions of downloads and thousands of weekly players. The project has a very active modding community, and many available games to run. There was one big issue - you had to manually install mods and games by unzipping their files into a directory. This was a very poor user experience.