The homepage of Matt Gaunt-Seo - gaunt.dev

GitHub Notifications

Wed, 11 Dec 2024 20:36:00 -0700

GitHub Notifications

This is how I work through GitHub pull requests, this isn’t going to be for everyone but it’s been working well for me for a while.

The tl;dr is Notifier for GitHub for keeping an eye on PR count & quick access to GitHub inbox and I use a GitHub Action to keep the notifications focused on what needs attention.

Vibe Check №5

Tue, 28 Feb 2023 17:39:00 -0700

Vibe Check №5

⚗️ Been working on plumbing GoCD into Sentry’s custom workflows (pinging tools that direct events to people and channels). Nothing too crazy, but several languages and moving pieces.

Folks before me set up Sentry error monitoring from our GitHub CI to log when specific tests fail. I’ve been sorting the issues this past month, so it’s easier to parse and track which tests are flakey and how frequently they flake. It’s surprisingly helpful to have this data, and Sentry’s libraries make it easy to collect (pytest-sentry, jest-sentry-environment). The downside is that acting on this has been difficult. Some tests are trivial to fix, others I need help figuring out how to run them. In many cases, identifying an owner is challenging.

Use Reusable GitHub Workflows

Thu, 16 Feb 2023 18:46:00 -0700

Use Reusable GitHub Workflows

Some of my websites, including gaunt.dev, were borked recently.

The reason was simple; I relied on a PostCSS feature that would inline CSS variables.

For example, if my source was:

/* variables/_colors.css */
:root {
	--light-theme-base: #f8f6f4;
	--light-theme-opposite: #373150;
	--light-theme-base-2: #373150;
	--light-theme-opposite-2: #f8f6f4;
	--light-theme-accent-1: #ff7867;
	--light-theme-accent-2: #84d2ee;
	--light-theme-accent-3: #fed9a1;
	--light-theme-accent-4: #3c55a5;
}

/* components/c-example.css */
.c-example {
	color: var(--light-theme-accent-1);
}

The sites would end up with something similar to:

Vibe Check №4

Sat, 24 Dec 2022 19:29:00 -0700

Vibe Check №4

🫠 Work has been a struggle. Lots of changes mid-way through a project and just generally struggling to find a good use of my time.

Unfortunately moved off of the current project and have shifted my focus to reducing our CI times which has resulted in a lot of digging into python tests, jest tests and selenium tests.

Vibe Check №3

Sun, 20 Nov 2022 10:26:00 -0700

Vibe Check №3

Not much to report this month, barely feels like a month has passed.

🫠 Work is currently focused on a big old pile of terraform and GoCD. While it’s fun working on something that is completely new to me, I’m questioning myself on whether our time investments were misplaced in terms of corners we could cut in the short terms vs investing time confirming broad implementation details.

Vibe Check №2

Tue, 18 Oct 2022 18:01:00 -0700

Vibe Check №2

A difficult month for sure. Family events eclipsing most things, but I did get the joy of looking after Luna the delightful pitty while my better half was off traveling.

I’m hoping that once I’m back home I can focus more on exercise. The past month has been unkind on a lot of fronts so focusing on my health will help a great deal.

GLIBC not found with AWS SAM and Golang

Sat, 01 Oct 2022 11:44:00 -0700

GLIBC not found with AWS SAM and Golang

A small AWS SAM project stopped working due to my OS updating to a newer dependency version that SAM couldn’t use.

The error I’d run into occurred when running the Lambda function:

/var/task/healthcheck: /lib64/libc.so.6: version `GLIBC_2.32' not found (required by /var/task/healthcheck)
/var/task/healthcheck: /lib64/libc.so.6: version `GLIBC_2.34' not found (required by /var/task/healthcheck)
2022/10/01 18:48:58 exit status 1
01 Oct 2022 18:48:58,162 [ERROR] (rapid) Init failed error=Runtime exited with error: exit status 1 InvokeID=
/var/task/healthcheck: /lib64/libc.so.6: version `GLIBC_2.32' not found (required by /var/task/healthcheck)
/var/task/healthcheck: /lib64/libc.so.6: version `GLIBC_2.34' not found (required by /var/task/healthcheck)
2022/10/01 18:48:58 exit status 1

This error has been reported to aws-lambda-go here, however, the fix is to build the project using go build, and I’ve been using sam build.

Vibe Check №1

Mon, 12 Sep 2022 09:57:00 -0700

Vibe Check №1

Ever since Dave Rupert started doing vibe checks I’ve wanted to start doing them if nothing else beyond forcing myself to write blog posts more frequently, so here we are.

No goals, only vibes

🫠 I’ve started a new job at Sentry, joining the developer infrastructure team. It’s the start of week three, and I’m enjoying it and slowly figuring stuff out.

Web serial issues on Google Chrome

Sun, 14 Aug 2022 13:00:00 -0700

Web serial issues on Google Chrome

DISCLAIMER: I’m currently using Fedora, other distro’s may not have the same issue or may need a different approach to fix an issue with web serial, so please read the steps rather than blindly copy commamds as you may have a different issue.

Linux and a Bluetooth Dongle

Wed, 25 May 2022 13:00:00 -0700

Linux and a Bluetooth Dongle

My and my partner have started sharing our office space, and I decided to get some Airpod Pros to help reduce some of the background noise.

The Airpods are great, but my computer has always struggled with Bluetooth headphones.

I figured I’d try and find a Linux friendly Bluetooth adapter to see if I could get something working.

Leaving Google

Mon, 28 Mar 2022 09:57:00 -0700

Leaving Google

Today is my last day at Google.

It’s a mix of feelings after handing in my resignation. I’m grateful for all of the opportunities Google has given me, yet there is a strong sense of relief getting to step back.

Over the past 10 years, I’ve worked with several teams, had numerous roles, traveled the world, met many incredible people, and moved to the US.

Cloudflare, AWS API Gateway & Custom Domains

Fri, 11 Mar 2022 09:57:00 -0700

Cloudflare, AWS API Gateway & Custom Domains

I’ve been playing with AWS Lambda on and off for a while, using SAM to deploy my lambda and access it through a custom domain.

Everything had been working fine until I recently changed the naming of my API gateway and switched from a RestAPI to a HttpAPI for my lambda functions.

Social games during a pandemic

Mon, 15 Feb 2021 21:31:00 -0700

The open-source engineering team had a bubbling sense of not being together due to the pandemic. The group spends time chatting throughout the workday on our always running video chat, but nothing moved us off work-related topics.

As an experiment, we started a “social hour” where the purpose was to jump on the video call and not work. We ended up playing games, and it’s removed that feeling of the team feeling apart.

New version of gauntface.com

Fri, 01 May 2020 12:00:00 -0700

New version of gauntface.com

There is a general cadence for me to change my site once every year or two, either because I get tired of the look of it, or the stack is just not working for me.

Old stack

The previous version of my site was using a custom-built static site generator, and I bailed on it because I was starting to want features that were common in all other static site generators and I couldn’t justify the work.

Continuous Deployment with AWS and GitHub Actions

Sun, 05 Apr 2020 12:00:00 -0700

Continuous Deployment with AWS and GitHub Actions

After using Netlify and Firebase to host different sites I reached a point where I was hitting limits on the free tiers they offer.

To reduce costs I ended up switching to AWS with GitHub actions for continuous deployment.

Overall the process was easier than I expected.

KBWiki Tutorial Notes

Sat, 02 Feb 2019 10:00:00 -0700

These are my notes from running through the kbwiki tutorial / guide for making a custom keyboard.

First few sections is largely getting familiar with GitHub and KiCad.

PCB Guide 3

Wondering the the position of the +5V over the UVCC pin and chaining with two join points has any benefit over placing the +5V over VCC. I assume it makes no difference as this is just a schematic view.

Crimp Housing for Makers

Sat, 19 Jan 2019 18:00:00 -0700

The thought of soldering a circuit board when I’m still playing and learning how it works seems like a waste, but I’ve found a few situations where I wanted something between breadboard and permanent project. Enter crimp pins and housing.

What are they?

Crimp pins come in male and female forms and can be attached to the end of thin electrical wire.

Raspberry Pi Over Serial USB on Ubuntu

Thu, 17 Jan 2019 19:14:00 -0700

Running commands on the Raspberry Pi over serial USB makes development a lot easier when starting out with a fresh install of Raspbian.

Worth noting, most of this guide is from the Adafruit Guide, but I had a permission issue and since I’m hoping to use this cable a lot in the future, I decided to write a cut down version for myself.

Testing for the Web

Fri, 16 Sep 2016 03:20:06 -0700

Testing for the Web

After sitting on this for a while, I’ve come to the conclusion that testing a web app is a manual job.

I’ve been working on selenium-assistant for some time now, trying to make testing on real browsers a little easier.

In the early versions of building the library, supporting Chrome and Firefox was proving it’s worth highlighting service worker differences.

Push Debugging & Analytics

Sun, 01 May 2016 09:59:51 -0700

Push Debugging & Analytics

A few people have asked how do to debug push messaging and how to track stats for push messaging, like push messages received or notifications clicked?

Debugging in the Wild.

I found an app out in the wild that had a few problems and heres how I go about spotting issues.

Unit Testing a Service Worker

Mon, 14 Dec 2015 13:03:03 -0800

Unit Testing a Service Worker

After reading a few discussions on Twitter and discussing some of the pro and cons of sw-toolbox and sw-precache with Mat Scales and Jeff Posnick, I realised I had no idea of half the edge cases that exist when it comes to using SW.

Start Up Scripts for Raspbian

Wed, 02 Dec 2015 15:23:40 -0800

Start Up Scripts for Raspbian

On older versions of Raspbian I was using LSBInitScripts to start a web server when my Raspberry Pi booted up.

In Debian Jessie, the use of init scripts changed to systemd, so this post covers how to get a script starting on boot.

Node Unit Testing

Fri, 30 Oct 2015 16:35:23 -0700

Node Unit Testing

I’ve recently started work on a new project all on my tod and in a vein attempt to get reassurance that what I was writing worked, I started to put together some unit tests and while it’s still a little messy, I figured some may find this post helpful to skip through the early stages of “OMG, WTF, ERGH, OK, Maybe?” that I went through

Raspberry Pi Network

Sun, 11 Oct 2015 20:57:32 -0700

Raspberry Pi Network

I’ve just got something super minimal, but actually useful working on my Pi. It’s a node server serving up a web page that toggles a button that switches an Energenie Plug on and off.

One of the problems I’ve been having is that Raspberry Pi keeps losing connection to the Wifi network. Here are the two things I’ve done to fix the problem.

Gulp & Sass

Tue, 09 Jun 2015 16:10:49 -0700

Gulp & Sass

Hopefully I’ll be doing some work on the Web Fundamentals site used for hosting the Chrome team documentation.

One of the first things I wanted to tackle was styles for a few reasons:

1.) It’s something I know I am going to change 2.) We currently have a ruby dependency because of Sass which I want to get rid of 3.) It’s relatively simple to check if it’s working, Sass goes in, CSS comes out.

Arachnidlabs Minishift and Ubuntu / Pi

Tue, 24 Mar 2015 20:22:43 -0700

Arachnidlabs Minishift and Ubuntu / Pi

I was mucking around with the the Arachnidlabs minishift and ran into a few things I wanted to note down for my own sanity.

udev Rules on Ubuntu

One thing I quickly hit was the inability to run any of the minishift python code on my machine without sudo, which originally freaked me and took a while to dig around with.

Fetch is the new XHR

Wed, 11 Feb 2015 11:11:07 -0800

Fetch is the new XHR

fetch(), defined in the Fetch API, is a new API which allows you to make requests similar to XHR’s, but has a simpler / friendly API. The Fetch API is available in service workers today and in the global space (a.k.a in the normal Chrome window) if you enable the Experimental Web Platform Features in chrome://flags.

What the Virtual Viewport?

Fri, 16 Jan 2015 14:38:40 -0800

What the Virtual Viewport?

The virtual viewport is a new term that has been floating around the Chrome DevRel team lately and we kind of figured we should find out what it is.

The way [Rick Byers](https://plus.google.com/ RickByers/about) describes it is as follows, the idea is splitting the notion of “the viewport” into the “layout viewport” (where fixed position items are attached) and the “visual viewport” (What the users actually see).

Trying to do a Good Job

Tue, 06 Jan 2015 18:26:23 -0800

Trying to do a Good Job

We recently had a workshop with Harry Roberts (a.k.a CSSWizardry) at the Google Office, largely with a goal of learning about better web project maintenance, hopefully helping us improve Web Starter Kit.

The annoying with this workshop was the number of things that immediately made sense to do in terms of best practice, the tricks were awesome and general ethos was reassuring.

Push Notifications & Service Worker

Mon, 15 Dec 2014 09:27:42 -0800

Push Notifications & Service Worker

Please Read

I’m moving all this content to here: https://github.com/gauntface/web-push-book

If you just want a quick and easy demo of push go here:

Demo: https://simple-push-demo.appspot.com/
Source: https://github.com/gauntface/simple-push-demo

Orig. Photo: https://flic.kr/p/nFov1y

DevTools Ideas

Wed, 10 Dec 2014 11:51:11 -0800

DevTools Ideas

One of the biggest failings of service worker at the moment is the debugging story.

Its genuinely a shame since the API for service worker is simple enough to get going with, but complex enough to loop yourself in circles with simple errors and they’d be easier to work with if the debugging story had been thought through.

What You Need to Know About the WebView in L

Fri, 17 Oct 2014 19:25:26 -0700

What You Need to Know About the WebView in L

WebView Updated via Play Store

With the L release, the WebView can be updated by the Play Store, this is a huge achievement!

Major New Features

The following features are now supported in the latest WebView:

Is the Web a Developers Cwtch?

Fri, 10 Oct 2014 10:19:27 -0700

Is the Web a Developers Cwtch?

I’ve been looking for a way to frame this post, this title is probably the closest I can get to expressing my point of view; plus I can reward myself bonus points for using my favorite welsh word.

Cwtch

Your Guide to SSL on Nginx

Tue, 09 Sep 2014 18:41:00 -0700

Your Guide to SSL on Nginx

Looking to set up SSL on your site? Using Nginx to host? Then come on it.

7 Steps to SSL Bliss

1.) Get a Certificate

Go over to namecheap.com and pick yourself up a nice little cert. The cheapest is about $9.00 (~£5.58)

WebP Support with ImageMagick and PHP

Tue, 02 Sep 2014 18:39:00 -0700

WebP Support with ImageMagick and PHP

I’ve been wanting to get WebP set-up on my site for a little while now, the biggest barrier to entry has been getting it integrated into the flow already had, where I generate different sized images where I need to.

Raspberry Pi <3 Node

Thu, 28 Aug 2014 23:15:05 -0700

Raspberry Pi <3 Node

I remember trying to get Node to run on the Pi when I first got one and it really wasn’t a fun journey, things seem to have changed (or my Google-foo has gotten better) and it’s dead simple.

Install Node and NPM

Best guide was from Adafruit. These deb’s are actually more up to date than the Pi builds available of the official NodeJS site.

Let's Look at Load Time Performance

Wed, 16 Jul 2014 18:54:23 -0700

Let’s Look at Load Time Performance

I’ve been doing work on my site for far too long now.

One of the things I spent some time on up front was getting my PageSpeed Score up. All the way up in fact, to 100/100.

Building Mobile Cordova Apps with Web Starter Kit

Wed, 16 Jul 2014 15:38:06 -0700

Building Mobile Cordova Apps with Web Starter Kit

If you have no idea what Web Starter Kit is, the simple overview is that it’s a set of opinionated tools that can help you get up and running with web development best practices for a new project. Including a build process, browser sync, live reloading and all sorts of other goodies.

Web Performance Monitor

Thu, 10 Jul 2014 21:11:13 -0700

Web Performance Monitor

I’ve been wanting and needing a dashboard for continuously testing out the performance of my site and I’ve never really found anything that met my needs. In the end, I put together a Web Performance Monitor.

It consists of three parts:

A PageSpeed library module webperf-lib-psi
- This essentially takes either a list of URL’s or a sitemap and runs it through the PageSpeed Insights API and emits events when a new result, run completion or error event occurs.
A Cron Job-esque module called webperf-monitor
- Running this module with a config file containing database credentials and a sitemap URL, the tool will use the aforementioned library to crawl over a set of URLs, get the PageSpeed Scores for each of them and stash the results into a database.
The final piece of the jigsaw is the web front-end webperf-monitor-frontend
- This is an uber simple NodeJS app which creates a web front-end for the data which is now stored in a database.

You can checkout what the end result is like at gauntface.com/perfmatters/

Installing SSL Certs...

Fri, 04 Jul 2014 18:10:36 -0700

Installing SSL Certs…

The SSL cert is going to come from startssl.com since they are free and a recommendation from Mike West is more than good enough for me.

Getting the Certificates

To get an account you have to go through a bit of a dance to get some “login” certificates from StartSSL to install on your system.

WebView in the Developer Preview of L

Wed, 02 Jul 2014 21:04:32 -0700

WebView in the Developer Preview of L

The WebView in the Android Developer Preview of L has once again received an update, this time to Chromium M36 and brings with it some new web platform features.

If you haven’t been following the WebView updates since the KitKat release everything you need to know is right here in this video.

CodeIgniter + Markdown + Libraries = Hell

Mon, 17 Mar 2014 20:35:54 -0700

CodeIgniter + Markdown + Libraries = Hell

When it comes to pulling in third party libraries in CodeIgniter, there seems to be this little dance you need to do to get things working - frankly it sucks.

One of the tasks I had on my to-do list was to get Markdown converting to HTML using this helpful set of PHP classes: http://michelf.ca/projects/php-markdown/

PageSpeed Quirks & Google Plus Sign In

Thu, 13 Mar 2014 21:11:29 -0700

For the back-end of my blog I wanted to use Google+ sign-in so that I didn’t have to bother writing any user management logic.

I stuffed in the Javascript API, debugged an issue where the oauth2 token exchange where the PHP guide was lacking information on the subtle requirement of:

Pagespeed Score Hunt

Sun, 02 Mar 2014 21:49:40 -0800

Pagespeed Score Hunt

For those who aren’t aware of PageSpeed insights, it’s a service which will allow you to figure out where you could optimise the load time of your site and well worth checking out https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/.

IO Byte

For Google I/O 2014 I put together a video covering a lot of these details, with useful Grunt and Gulp tasks to achieve certain tasks.

Perf Wars: Gaunt Face vs Aerotwist

Fri, 28 Feb 2014 17:32:22 -0800

Perf Wars: Gaunt Face vs Aerotwist

In the not so distant past…

The second day running where it’s started off by being mocked for my poor code.

— Matt Gaunt (@gauntface) February 19, 2014

@gauntface: @aerotwist must like it as you “do all the bad things”.

— Chris Banes (@chrisbanes) February 19, 2014

New Site, New Approach

Sun, 16 Feb 2014 22:35:57 -0800

New Site, New Approach

I’ve started working on a new version of my site and I’m aiming to work on a range of problems / areas where my current site sucks.

Static Site

Originally the redesign was a static site, largely to see what I wanted the site to look like / how I the UX to behave.

Cordova + Web Best Practices v2.0

Wed, 05 Feb 2014 21:55:42 -0800

Cordova + Web Best Practices v2.0

My oh my doesn’t time fly, a little while a go I wrote a blog post on how to get Cordova and Yeoman to work together bringing the best practices of the web to Cordova based applications.

Well times have changed, we’ve all grown a little older, a little wiser and projects have progressed, with that in mind here is the new way to get yourself set up with Cordova and Yeoman.

Raspberry Pi Adventure - Day 2

Thu, 16 Jan 2014 21:09:19 -0800

Raspberry Pi Adventure - Day 2

One of the nice things about the Pi, is how small it is, meaning it’s easy to find a spot for it to live, well you could if it wasn’t for those pesky cables.

That’s why I opted for wifi over ethernet. The next target on my cable hit list was HDMI, which we can get rid of by making our Pi accessible via VNC.

D-Pad Navigation in a Web App 2.0

Tue, 14 Jan 2014 15:27:34 -0800

A little over a year ago I wrote D-Pad Navigation in a Web App. The biggest problem was it required a lot of work to get things going, so I spent a few days rewriting some of the logic into a more friendly, generic library.

Translucent Theme in Android

Fri, 10 Jan 2014 14:37:45 -0800

Translucent Theme in Android

One of the new features in KitKat is the Translucent UI, where you have the ability to sit behind status and navigation bars, meaning you can have the subtle change shown above (left side is normal, right side is the translucent version).