Luc Perkins

Developer experience and the membrane layer

lucperkins@gmail.com (Luc Perkins) — Fri, 04 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve done a whole lot of, err, stuff in software—plain old dev work, tech writing, DevRel, all and sundry “glue work”—but when pressed for a single designation for what I do I usually just say that I specialize in developer experience (or DevEx for short). While I have an intuitive sense of what DevEx is, I’ve often struggled to explain it, not just to friends and family who don’t know much about technology but even to other industry insiders. A while back, though, right in the middle of a job interview, I came up with an analogy that’s stuck with me and that I’ll probably use until the end of my days in the industry.

The easiest way (I've found) to create your own Nix channel

lucperkins@gmail.com (Luc Perkins) — Mon, 10 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0000

There are lots of ways of creating Nix channels, but in this post I’d like to highlight the fastest and easiest way I’ve found thus far: via GitHub archives. I discovered this method when installing Home Manager. Nix channels are essentially tarballs that are available via an unchanging URL. Quite conveniently, GitHub has a built-in archive feature that automatically turns every branch in every GitHub repo into a tarball available at a URL with this structure:

From Homebrew to Home Manager

lucperkins@gmail.com (Luc Perkins) — Thu, 16 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Don’t get me wrong: I have nothing against Homebrew, the macOS package manager that most devs who run Apple laptops use on a near-daily basis. It’s served me admirably all these years and I’ve even written some Homebrew recipes.

But I’ve become convinced that there’s a better way—or at least a way that suits my needs better. I recently switched from Homebrew to Home Manager, the Nix-based user environment manager created by Robert Helgesson, and I’ve been extremely pleased with the results so far. Home Manager has enabled me to establish a fully declarative approach to managing my laptop environment, including my dotfiles.

Service mesh use cases

lucperkins@gmail.com (Luc Perkins) — Mon, 29 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Service mesh is a blazing hot topic in software engineering right now and rightfully so. I think it’s extremely promising technology and I’d love to see it widely adopted (in cases where it truly makes sense). Yet it remains shrouded in mystery for many people and even those who are familiar with it have trouble articulating what it’s good for and what it even is (like yours truly). In this post, I’m going to help rectify that by providing a simple list of use cases for service meshes.

Recent database technology that should be on your radar (part 1)

lucperkins@gmail.com (Luc Perkins) — Mon, 15 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I’m a huge fan of databases, so much so that I’ve written a book on so-called “NoSQL” databases, I spent some of my most fruitful years in tech working on the highly influential distributed database Riak, and I even built a database called Purple last year just for fun.

Naturally, I’m always on the lookout for new and exciting developments in databases and DB-related tools when I scan (trash fires like) Twitter, Reddit, and HackerNews. In this post I’d like to talk about three recently minted database technologies that I find intriguing:

A new way forward for technical documentation? Part 1: the problematic status quo

lucperkins@gmail.com (Luc Perkins) — Tue, 21 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve contributed to many very large documentation projects in my day, including Riak, Kubernetes, Prometheus, Pulsar, Heron, BookKeeper, and several others. On all of those projects I worked as some combination of tech writer, web designer, and build system “plumbing” person (i.e. the person in charge of making sure that the documentation inputs are converted into the right outputs and that those outputs are shipped to the right place).

In other words, I’ve seen as much documentation sausage being made as just about anyone in our industry. And I hate to say it but my experience has led me to the firm conclusion that our documentation tools are fundamentally broken for many common use cases. In this post I’ll explain why I feel this way. In the forthcoming part 2, I’ll point to what I think could be a more sound path.

Tract: a Hugo theme for ambitious documentation projects

lucperkins@gmail.com (Luc Perkins) — Mon, 02 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Hello! I wanted to tell you all about an open source project I’m working on that I’m pretty excited about. It’s called Tract and it’s a Hugo theme for large documentation projects. I aim to release version 0.1.0 by the end of 2019. In the meantime, check out the current home page or a sample docs page.

Welcome to my blog!

lucperkins@gmail.com (Luc Perkins) — Thu, 28 Nov 2019 00:00:00 +0000

All right folks, I’m doing it old school. I like Medium well enough, but I thought this would be a fun personal project and a chance to both flex my design muscles a little bit and gain full control over how I present information.

Stay tuned!