Czech/in/Japan

Gallery: building my own home server

Let’s pretend I didn’t forget to write anything for the past two years, nor finish my article on shell setup, and let me show you my latest addition to my home

Random

My ultimate shell setup with Fish shell and Tmux (Part 1)

I’ve recently been asked to share my shell setup, which if you ask me, that’s one of the highest levels of praise you can achieve as a software developer 🤣

Web

Terraform Recipes: CloudFront TLS certificates

At the end of the previous article, I briefly hinted at various intricacies of provisioning a TLS certificate for your CloudFront distribution. Let’s briefly have a look at what you can expect and how to deal with it!

Web

Terraform Recipes: CloudFront distribution from an S3 bucket

In this new short series of articles, I want to share Terraform recipes to common tasks. These will be highly opinionated (as everything on this site is), but I believe that these are fairly close to the ideal approach.

Web

Getting started with server monitoring and alerting

This short article loosely follows my previous adventures in self-hosting services such as mail server, file server and document server; this time, I’ll show you how I handled server monitoring and alerting so that no matter what happens to the server, I can be quickly alerted.

Web

Taking self-hosting to a whole new level

In my previous article, I briefly described how I modernized the way this website is hosted, and how I better utilized the VPS it’s running on. Since then, I tweaked a few things and added one really big feature. Let me show you around a bit, I think you’ll like it.

Web

Bringing this website to 2019 with Dokku, GitHub Actions, Terraform Cloud, and Mailcow

For over a year, this website operated in a fairly simple way: a lonely Digital Ocean’s Droplet was running a MySQL database and a Ghost CMS instance behind a Nginx webserver. Over the past few weeks, I decided to pimp the server up just a little bit.

Gallery

Gallery: building my own mechanical keyboard

Ever since I bought the Das Keyboard last year, I knew that mechanical keyboards are much more comfortable than any keyboard Apple has offered in the past 16 years – at the very least, you don’t have to deal with the absolute disaster known as Butterfly Mechanism.

Random

How to clock out of work with style

If there’s one defining characteristic of mine, it would be a horrible case of forgetfulness. It manifests in many different ways: sometimes I forgot to clock out of work, sometimes I forget to text my wife I’m coming home. Let’s kill two birds with one… massive stone today.

Japan

How to get a good Internet connection in Japan

My time in Tokyo has come to an end and since March, I live in the Kansai area. However, that also means it’s time to change the Internet provider. Here’s how I did it.

Japan

How to get Japanese driving license

One thing I wanted to do for the longest time was to switch my Czech driving license for a Japanese one. The only thing preventing me from doing so was my enormous laziness and not being completely sure what is required.

Japan

How to survive Japanese banks

This article is, unfortunately, going to be a bit different from all the other “How to Japan” articles. In my previous articles, I tried to present a problem and show a solution to overcome the obstacles in my way. When it comes to Japanese banks, I’m afraid I haven’t found that solution yet.

Gallery

Retro gallery: GameBoy Zero

Or technically, a “double retro gallery” since these images are over 1.5 years old; back when I was taking them, I didn’t have a website to share the fruits of my labor with the world, but since now I have one that sometimes even works, I thought to myself, “why not publish these images again”?

Gallery

Gallery: 鎌倉 (Kamakura)

This week, the weather in the Kanto area really doesn’t look nice at all. Fortunately, this wasn’t the case this past Saturday when I and my wife took the advantage of a truly lovely weather and took a trip to Kamakura, in the Kanagawa prefecture.

Vapor

How to master a multi-stage continuous delivery of Vapor apps to a Kubernetes cluster

Wow, that title sure is a mouthful. I think is certainly breaks some sort of weird record for this site!

Gallery

Gallery: 私のアパート (my apartment)

I’ve been waiting for weeks to finally finish furnishing my small Japanese apartment, and with (hopefully) last piece of furniture arriving this Friday and everything looking exactly as I wish it to look, I can finally share the fruits of my labour with you. This is how I live now!

Japan

How to get a job in Japan

I swear I have been putting of writing this article for a really long time. In the following paragraphs, I will try to describe my road to Japan (which necessarily involves getting a job first) and hopefully provide a few pieces of advice that could help anyone wishing to pursue the same path.

Gallery

Gallery: 目黒不動尊 (Megurofudouson) and 林試の森公園 (Rinshi no Mori Park)

With Golden Week, arguably the biggest public holiday in Japan, coming slowly to its end, here’s a small gallery from a trip me and my wife went on yesterday.

Japan

How to get an apartment in Japan

I finally made it to Japan but besides having a job, I had the foolish wish of also having the place to live, a place I could call my “home”. Here are the steps I had to undergo and the help I had to receive, as this task would be impossible to complete on my own.

Vapor

How to hot reload a Vapor project

One question that gets frequently asked in Vapor’s Slack channel is whether is it possible to not have to recompile the entire project upon the slightest change in the source code. Until recently, I would have told you that this is just the reality of compiled languages, but today I have a solution.

Japan

Direction: Japan!

There are so many topics that I actually wanted to write about in these past few days (and I will get to them eventually, surely) but none is more important for me than the events happening recently.

Web

How to de-Googlify your life

Google, back in the day, used to be one of those companies that were loved by everyone and could essentially do no wrong. Due to Google’s actions in the past few years, it feels like that illusion is slowly disappearing and the true nature of the company starts showing – and it's not a nice look.

Web

How to get a free SSL certificate for your GitHub Pages site

In the first article on this site, I described a way to host your site or blog on GitHub Pages while having it accessible via your own domain. I left the article with one thing left unsolved: the site was not accessible via HTTPS, and something like that would not fly in current year.

Web

How to host your site for free using GitHub Pages

And not just host, but also set your site up to work on a custom domain and automate deployment using Travis CI. Automatic spell and grammar check included!

Random

Hello, world!

I hope nobody is counting the number of times I restarted my website. Do people actually still write blogs these days?