Nick told us about this on our modern Unix tooling episode, but I thought I’d link up his excellent writeup/video on the subject for those who had a hard time following with audio only.

Let’s say you have an nginx or Kubernetes config file which doesn’t support templating out of the box and you want to dynamically create config files based on 1 or more environment variables. This is what envsubst lets you do.

This week we’re talking with Nick Janetakis about modern unix tools, and the various commands, tooling, and ways we use the commmand line. Do you Bash or Zsh? Do you use cat or bat? What about man vs tldr? Today’s show is a deep dive into unix tools you know and love, or should know and maybe love.

Nick Janetakis shares a few patterns he’s picked up based on using Docker since 2014 for many freelance projects. He also posted a timestamped video version on YouTube if you’d prefer to watch over reading.

Jose Valim (the creator of Elixir) recently asked developers from all programming languages to contribute a solution to a short coding challenge based on a real world use case that I had come up while building an Elixir application. Here’s what happened.

Nick does a great job with these videos. If you’ve never given Turbolinks a serious look, this would be 20 minutes well spent. We’ve been using Turbolinks for 4+ years now with great success.

Nick Janetakis (whose voice you recently heard on Backstage #4) walks through 3 different open source code bases, including ours. This is a somewhat lengthy video (37:13), but Nick has nicely timestamped it out in the first YouTube comment. 👍

Nick Janetakis joins Jerod backstage to talk shop. We discuss how Nick is using the Changelog.com source code as a guide to build his video course platform, coding practices we’ve developed over the years, how to balance between shipping features and creating content, newsletters as the new social network, how Nick makes his videos, and a whole lot more.

Nick Janetakis has been using Vim for just over a month, but he’s gotten up to speed pretty quickly and is ready to help you do the same:

I think it’s worth writing posts like this while you’re still a semi-beginner because once you’ve been using something for a really long time, it’s easy to forget the details of what helped you out early on.

Nick Janetakis takes on the most common argument against 80 chars per line:

It’s easy to think “wtf, I have a massive monitor, why should I limit myself to a standard that was created for punch cards in 1928 or terminals from the late 1970s?”

If that’s what you’re thinking, definitely give this a read. He makes a strong case. One thing is for sure, you don’t want to end up like this guy… 😆

Let’s talk about when it might be a good or bad idea to start using microservices. SPOILER ALERT: it’s not the same for every project.

Yes. This is what we’re hearing as well. Break off a piece or part of your app that needs a different level of scale, language, or other to solve the problem better and make it a service.