Another Classic Weekend

November 4th, 2018

It was another two day’s of racing this weekend. On Saturday BAOC had an urban race around Winchester based at Peter Symonds college. Christine was resting her knee so it was just the children and myself competing. Their courses were confined to the college grounds with Duncan finishing 5th M12- and Emma 3rd W12- (although they were running the same course and Duncan actually beat Emma).

The navigation wasn’t particularly challenging with many long legs meaning there was lots of hard running to be done. With a late start, I knew what time I should be aiming for and things became increasingly frantic as I headed into the last five controls. Needless to say, I managed to waste time on the last two controls, but still managed to take first place. The time of 43 minutes looks more respectable in the context of the 10k I ran and not the 6.4k quoted for the course length!

Sunday brought the November Classic. We all started today although only because I’d entered Christine by mistake! There was light rain over Hampton Ridge whilst we were out (the picture above was taken later in the day). We met with mixed fortunes. Duncan had a good run, finishing second on M10A. Christine walked round a few controls before returning. Emma was out for over an hour without finding any of her controls. My legs didn’t feel too bad until the last part of the course. My downfall was repeatedly hunting for pits in the bracken which saw me finish in 5th place. Thankfully, no events planned for next weekend!

OMM White

November 4th, 2018

Last weekend it was the OMM in the Black Mountains, South Wales. Christine’s parents had offered to mind the children so Christine and I were running the Medium Score together. There was a biting wind but blue skies as we set off on Saturday morning. There was some early indecision but we soon settled down to a steady mountain marathon pace. As the morning went on, the skies started to look increasingly ominous and, as we cross one bit of particularly bleak hillside, the snow began and persisted for long enough to paint the mountainside white. We reached the campsite with around twenty minutes to spare – not long enough to have fitted anything else in.

It was a long night in the campsite, made more bearable by being able to chat to Christine brother and his wife in the tent next to us. Due to the cold, we both ‘slept’ in all of our clothes, including waterproofs. We were certainly glad to discover that, as third mixed pair, we qualified for the chasing start and had an hour less to spend in the campsite in the morning.

Although we removed a layer, we both kept our waterproofs on for the whole of the second day. Christine’s knee was giving her grief (a likely outcome even before we started the weekend) and, as a consequence, we were setting a pretty stately pace. We reined in our plans as we went round and, although we finished with another 25 minutes to spare, at the speed we were going it still wouldn’t have got us another checkpoint. We were 47th on the second day which brought us down from 13th to 28th over the two days. Still respectable but not what we would have hoped for had we both been fit and healthy. On the plus side, it did mean we could slip away before the prize giving and make it home in reasonable time!

If you watch the promotional video, you’ll catch a brief glimpse of us finishing on the first day around the 1:33 mark. Thanks to Christine’s dad who purchased the image above where we were reunited with the children at the finish. You can also find our routes from Day 1 and 2 on RouteGadget.

Oracle Code One: Continuous Delivery to Kubernetes with Jenkins and Helm

October 31st, 2018

Last week I was out in San Francisco at Oracle Code One (previously known as JavaOne). I had to wait until Thursday morning to give my session on “Continuous Delivery to Kubernetes with Jenkins and Helm”. This was the same title I presented in almost exactly the same spot back in February at IBM’s Index Conference but there were some significant differences in the content.

Continuous Delivery to Kubernetes with Jenkins and Helm from David Currie

The first half was much the same. As you can see from the material on SlideShare and GitHub, it covers deploying Jenkins on Kubernetes via Helm and then setting up a pipeline with the Kubernetes plugin to build and deploy an application, again, using Helm. This time, I’d built a custom Jenkins image with the default set of plugins used by the Helm chart pre-installed which improved start-up times in the demo.

I had previously mounted in the Docker socket to perform the build but removed that and used kaniko instead. This highlighted one annoyance with the current approach used by the Kubernetes plugin: it uses exec on long-running containers to execute a shell script with the commands defined in the pipeline. The default kaniko image is a scratch image containing just the executor binary – nothing there to keep it alive, nor a shell to execute the script. In his example, Carlos uses the kaniko:debug image which adds a busybox shell but that requires other hoops to be jumped through because the shell is not in the normal location. Instead, I built a kaniko image based on alpine.

The biggest difference from earlier in the year was, perhaps not unsurprisingly, the inclusion of Jenkins X. I hadn’t really left myself enough time to do it justice. Given the normal terrible conference wifi and the GitHub outage earlier in the week, I had recorded a demo showing initial project creation, promotion, and update. I’ve added a voiceover so you can watch it for yourself below (although you probably want to go full-screen unless you have very good eyesight!).

Introduce poetry to your Kube config with ksonnet

October 15th, 2018
WordPress › Error

There has been a critical error on this website.

Learn more about troubleshooting WordPress.