Posts about gitlab

GitLab Profile Multi-project Pipeline

I my previous post I relayed setting up a GitLab scheduled profile to add blog posts from this site's RSS feed into my personalised GitLab profile. I discussed setting up a new profile project, creating the README, fetching and parsing the RSS and inserting it into the README, and creating a pipeline to add the changed README back to the profile project. Finally I scheduled the pipeline to run once daily.

Since I don't actually write a post every single day, this mainly runs to no purpose, consuming CI minutes and filling the job logs with pointless runs. It would be better if the pipeline had a job to update the README only after I've actually made a blog post.

Read more…

Personalised GitLab Profile page

On November 22nd, GitLab announced the release of 14.5, in which you can personalise your profile with a README. This README gives you scope to spice up your GitLab profile page quite a bit, for instance you could:

  • Add more details about yourself, beyond what you can fit into GitLab's small biography field
  • Link to other pages, or to projects you would like to feature, turning your profile into a portfolio
  • Include formatting with any of the markup formats which GitLab can understand

This weekend, I decided to turn my personal GitLab profile into something a bit more personalised, and include an automatically updated list of blog posts from this blog's RSS feed.

Read more…

Life Change for 2020: new job, remote working

It's happened again: my old job is redundant due to circumstance beyond my control, and I was made to find a new one. Like last time, I found a new, better job very quickly. Unlike last time though, I was prepared, and had even started applying…

2020-12-15: UPDATE — this was written in July but unpublished. I have had a few people ask about how I got a new job so darned fast, and I promised to blog about it. I've finally moved the blog off from GitHub Pages, and now at the end of the year is as good a time as any to publish this.

Read more…

Mad month of April


EDIT: 2021-05-18 A year after I wrote this, I found it floating around on an old laptop which has been untouched. It's a bit of a time capsule, and interesting to compare with what I later wrote about the same month. In some ways I think that it's better.


What a month April was! I've come through a turn of events and now things look stable enough that I can write about them.

TL;DR: Job change after COVID-19 fall-out, Staying at Home, loss and hope.

Read more…

Password databases: setting up password-store on a Unix computer

Having covered what pass is, why I'm using it, and the required supporting tools gnupg, git, ssh and a private git remote, it's time to go over how to put the system together.

Setting it all up on a Unix computer is fairly straight-forward. Getting it onto an Android is a bit different. So in this post I'll cover how the pieces of the system fit together, and then walk through setting it up on Unix.

Synchronising your local password-store git repository with your remote store is done a bit differently depending if this is the first time you're setting up the remote, or if you already have a remote and you wish to merge it into your new local. I'll cover that too.

Read more…