Samizdat blog by Egor Kovetskiy

Phantom Patch

egor@samizdat.dev (Egor Kovetskiy) — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

GitHub (and many others) exposes mail-style patches at .patch URLs. If you download one of those patches and feed it to GNU patch, diff-shaped text inside the commit message can be applied as if it were part of the real patch.

It matters (to me) because wget/curl plus patch is not some exotic lab setup. It is a very old, very ordinary way to move a patch from one machine to another.

Prometheus: scrap all Docker Swarm tasks

egor@samizdat.dev (Egor Kovetskiy) — Mon, 28 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0000

We have a server with Docker Swarm initialized. A few services are running on it. We need to scrap metrics to prometheus and we want it to use direct connection to the services without going through a load balancer.

I’ve spent a bunch of time figuring out how to do it, so here is a tutorial just for my future self.

There are several ways to scrap metrics with service discovery:

Getting lucky with posting on Hacker News

egor@samizdat.dev (Egor Kovetskiy) — Mon, 23 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000

You know the feeling of watching your post quickly drowning in the Newest section of Hacker News, right? It seems like pure, chaotic luck. Or is it?

I tried to crack the code of successful submissions.

I built a tool that parses Hacker News every two minutes and logs the state into the database. The program has been working for 14 days so far.

For the latest two weeks, there were 13846 stories, and only 1403 of them reached the first page of Hacker News.

How I self-host my blog with Docker & Ansible

egor@samizdat.dev (Egor Kovetskiy) — Thu, 05 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I have always wanted to build a blog, but for a long time, I have been postponing it.

Well, I guess I thought it was difficult to build a blog. Turns out, even if you self-host it, it’s not that hard.

I decided to finally create it one day, and I had a few criteria:

No fancy admin panels. I want to write markdown and deliver it as is.
Without sacrificing the privacy of visitors, I should be able to collect traffic statistics, i.e. Google Analytics. No external JavaScripts.

Notes on Nailing Your First Launch by Adam Wathan

egor@samizdat.dev (Egor Kovetskiy) — Fri, 30 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve just watched the talk «Nailing Your First Launch» (MicroConf Starter 2018) by Adam Wathan and I took notes that I’d like to share and re-visit them in the future. Some of them are just text from his screens, some thoughts are mine.

But don’t let me steal the video from you by providing a digested summary. In my humble opinion, the main idea of watching talks or reading something is to change your mind model of seeing this topic. Don’t hesitate and start watching the video before proceeding to notes. The notes are here just to come back from time to time and re-call some especially useful highlights.

Keep your GitHub forks up to date

egor@samizdat.dev (Egor Kovetskiy) — Tue, 29 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Sometimes I do fork repositories and do some tweaks here and there for my personal needs which ain’t really going to be merged into the upstream repository.

One thing that used to concern me is that I needed to manually rebase my changes onto the upstream to have new goods but keep my changes on top of them.

Fortunately, GitHub Actions supports the schedule trigger for workflows and this is what we are going to use.

Use Markdown for Confluence

egor@samizdat.dev (Egor Kovetskiy) — Mon, 27 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000

TL;DR Mark — a tool for syncing your Markdown with Confluence

Devil’s Playground

Oh man, I was so frustrated when I was trying to edit docs in Confluence, and it broke all my text, trying to adjust any tags led to breaking the text even more. I felt the same when Slack introduced their Wysiwyg editor that solved problems that never existed, but at least they added an option to disable it.

Help message for shell scripts

egor@samizdat.dev (Egor Kovetskiy) — Tue, 07 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Have you ever thought how good it would be to have a help message for your shell script that you wrote a month ago and already forgot what it is supposed to do?

Yeah, there is always a way to show a message using cat (meow) or a bunch of echo calls.

But there is a neat trick.

Add your message with all the required information on top of your file, just right after the shebang.