Hello!

I am currently thinking about how to style websites now that we are looking into building a member console web app for Wiki Cafe. Component libraries The thing about component libraries is, there seems to be no obvious choice among the too many options out there. People out there say that styling things yourself and creating your own components is a pain that is not worth it. I sometimes feel skeptical about this, specially when the claim is being made by a website with a “pricing” link top and center, or when it is a clickbait factory tech influencer acting like the choice is a matter of life and death. On the other hand, I can’t ignore things like WAI-ARIA; I also have better things to do than to become a CSS expert; Finally, I’ve been at the beginning of the Dunning-Kruger curve way too many times to recognize the smell of my own overconfidence. ...

I am very invested, at least emotionally, in Coop Cloud as it is a project that is very much in alignment with what I think the Internet needs to remain useful and free. Won’t go into much detail about this here as this page is more about Coop Cloud than anything else. More thoughts on Coop Cloud Here is an unorganized braindump of things I’ve been thinking about regarding Coop Cloud. ...

At the moment, in Wiki Cafe, we use Coop Cloud tooling to run all of our applications. Coop Cloud’s recipes and CLI tool called abra are tools that help you self-host web applications easily without having to grok Docker Swarm. The recipes give you all the files you need to deploy applications with sane out-of-the-box configs. You can then use abra to deploy what the recipes describe. Easy. The cool thing about abra —and why it might be better to start off with abra—is that it forces you to use best practices for deployments while making it easier to do so. With abra, we are managing secrets, configs, environment variables, volumes, images, in ways that seasoned Docker users would, all without having to first read every page in the docker documentation site or the entire compose specification. ...

Docker Swarm stack configuration best practices Abra configuration management I’ve been thinking a lot about Docker Swarm stack configuration best practices as a result of working with Coop Cloud’s Abra. Abra is a CLI tool that makes it easier to self-host open source applications. Abra works with Coop Cloud’s Recipes, which are essentially versioned git repositories that have all of the files needed to deploy an application to a server using Docker. Abra serves as a wrapper around Docker Swarm so that users can get an app up and running without needing to know everything about containers and orchestration. ...

Dedicated container registries The CNCF’s Cloud Native Landscape, a comprehensive overview of cloud native projects and products, has a list of all notable container registry tools. Looking at our choices, we have 5 open source projects: Distribution (Docker Registry) Dragonfly Harbor Kraken Quay Distribution is best in minimal set ups where you don’t need anything beyond basic container registry capabilities. You should consider Harbor or Quay when you need additional features for managing image access, security, monitoring, etc. Harbor is a graduated CNCF project, while Quay is not. Harbor seems to be more popular and more mature, enjoying more features than Quay. ...

Sharing a directory among multiple users The Filesystem Hierarchy Standard does not specify where to share files among users, it does hint at making directories under /home for groups to share group files in those directories: On smaller systems, each user’s home directory is typically implemented as a subdirectory directly under /home, for example /home/smith, /home/torvalds, /home/operator, etc. On large systems (especially when the /home directories are shared amongst many hosts using NFS) it is useful to subdivide user home directories. Subdivision may be accomplished by using subdirectories such as /home/staff, /home/ guests, /home/students, etc ...