Kicking And Screaming

How valuable is code that runs fast, but can't be extended or modified? How can you be productive in a code base that's grown into a big ball of mud because that was how you made things fast? How much speed would you be willing to give up in the name of developer happiness and …

Like Miracle Grow For Your Garden

In the last post I did about the Vegetables testing framework I developed, I talked about how much of a success it had been. Now I've cranked it up to 11. I've now got what is effectively QuickCheck level functionality implemented in a Fortran testing framework. For anyone not familiar with QuickCheck, it is effectively …

New Toys

This effectively a direct copy of my last Arch Install post, but with modifications for my new laptop. It's a System76 Darter Pro, and so it a has a few differences from the Lenovo Yoga 13 I had before. The following are the steps I took in order to get Arch installed and running with …

The Power of a Testing Framework

I am now ready to call Vegetables a huge success. In my last post I discussed its design and construction. I am now using it in a project at work. The power and convenience it has brought us is huge. The design of Vegetables is such that its use highly encourages writing your tests in a …

Eat Your Vegetables

About a year ago, I was starting a new project at work using Fortran. For anybody who didn't know, the tools and libraries available to Fortran programmers are few and far between, and not particularly extensible or adaptable. But, being the testing and automation proponent I am, I went looking for a testing framework. The …

A Less Obnoxious Assistant

My last rendition of my Home Assistant Configuration (which you can read about here) was left in a rather obnoxious state. My wife isn't particularly good about checking her notifications regularly, so while I was at work, I would get a notification every 10 minutes for a while, until my wife finally realized she should …

Triggered

My Home Assistant now controls my HVAC the way I want it to. I'm now super happy about how it works, but man is the code ugly. To start with, I bought a very basic, Z-Wave thermostat. It has no smarts of its own, but can be controlled via Z-Wave. This means my home automation …

Maintainable Secrets

In my last post, I got Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) working for my Home Assistant home automation server. It worked at the time, but that was for a very basic configuration of Home Assistant. As I started to set up more components that needed keys or passwords, things started to get hairy. Luckily, …

Automating The Automation

I just got Home Assistant running on my Raspberry Pi in my previous post. Unfortunately, trying to edit the configuration file on the device is a major pain. The good news is, with the magic of automation, we can make things more convenient. We can put our configuration in a git repository, and set up …

Home Assistant Setup On Raspberry Pi 3B+

First, download the installation image from here. Then, unzip the image. Connect the SD card you are going to put in your Raspberry Pi, and then write the image to the card. Make sure you get the write device for the of= part. dd will overwrite whatever is there, even if it is your system drive. I …