Netherlands and more

Blog about life in Holland

Docker Indicator 0.1.0

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If you work with Docker a lot, you might have noticed that the list of containers tends to grow out of control over time. Now and then you bump into an abandoned dusty container somewhere in the dark corner of your /var/lib.

So I’ve created a tiny application indicator for Ubuntu/Unity to simplify managing my container collection. Please welcome the Docker Indicator!

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My entrepreneurship ‣ The quest for work

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This post continues the series about the challenging yet rewarding entrepreneur’s way, and I’d like to shed some light on my experience and learned lessons so far.

The very first question a freelancer gets is: how and where to search for work?

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Wintersport: Les Sybelles, France

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Last time I enjoyed snowboarding in the mountains so much that I’ve decided to do that once more, straight away. The next season is a year away, so why wait? After all, I’m now a freelancer, ain’t I?

There was also another reason to come back to the mountains: I’ve recently got the GoPro Hero 5 action camera, which yearned to be used!

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The Way You Make Me Feel: a masterpiece of looping

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On the subject of music and electronics at the same time: I wanted to share this video with you. It’s a live recording of The Way You Make Me Feel (originally by Michael Jackson) by a girl who calls herself Kawehi. No instruments, just voice and a looper device:

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My entrepreneurship ‣ The birth of Yktoo Solutions

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Following up on the Entities vs. persons story, let’s make a step from abstract theory to a bit more practical view on entrepreneurship.

Let me start with circumstances that pushed me in this direction. In 2016, in the course of yet another reorganisation at ING Bank, which was my employer back then, I was given a choice: keep earning money for someone else—or embark on an adventurous freelance journey.

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My entrepreneurship ‣ Entities and persons

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In my previous post I briefly listed pros and cons of being an entrepreneur. The next logical question is—what does it actually mean, to be an entrepreneur?

To properly answer this seemingly simple question one needs to take a deep dive into the swamp of Dutch laws, regulations, stipulations, and definitions.

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My entrepreneurship ‣ Pros and cons

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As a follow-up to the post about my professional anniversary and to fulfill my promise I’d like to elaborate on my reasons and the path of becoming an entrepreneur. The story is going to be quite long so I’ll split it up.

In fact the very idea of freelancing wasn’t new at all. Many of my expat friends living in Holland have been doing that for years. That mainly concerns IT specialists as they arguably represent the majority of those who came here from the ex-USSR.

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Tutorial: development with Yii/PHP/MySQL using Docker

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It’s been about a year since I’ve switched to developing this website (built with Yii 2/PHP/MySQL) using Docker. After just one try I realised that Docker is the best thing happened to development. Well, after Vim, of course.

So I’ve decided to write a brief tutorial on setting up a dockerised development environment, in the hope it could be helpful for those who never tried Docker or experience difficulties getting started.

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20 years, and counting

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With all that fuss I have missed the important date of 20 years of my professional experience, which happened on March 22, 2016.

The following scan of the first page of my Employment Book (Трудовая книжка, an official register of one’s work experience, which every employee in Russia is obliged to have) can prove that:

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Wintersport: La Plagne, France

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Preface

We had planned our trip to the French ski resort La Plagne well in advance, so ever since October last year I’ve been counting days down. My previous wintersport occasion in Sölden had only left good memories (and a couple of bruises, too, but that’s unimportant).

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Touchpad toggle script for Ubuntu

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Recently I’ve been busy learning the esoteric editor called Vim and figured out my laptop’s touchpad is causing nuisance when you’re working with the keyboard only—which is the whole point of using Vim. At the same time, some programs are nearly unusable without the mouse. In other words, I wanted to be able to switch the touchpad on and off—with the keyboard, of course.

Some laptops have a special key combination for it, but my Dell XPS 13" doesn’t. Ubuntu also provides a switch in the Control Center, but it’s hardly reachable without the mouse:

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