Blog posts index page 2

Optimizing & resizing images for Jekyll posts using Babashka

I’ve been tumbling down a rabbit hole for a little while now.

Feeling a desire to “write more” on my blog, motivated me to enhance the overall reading experience. However, customizing a Jekyll blog is not always easy due to the inherent limitations of the Liquid templating language and the modest amount of available plugins for GitHub Pages. Nevertheless, an improved reading experience led me to want a “featured image”. But images tend to affect webpage load speed… and speed matters. The featured image needed to be responsive and optimized, although doing it by hand made me shiver. Any manual repetitive process is boring and prone to errors. On top, it would remove the focus from writing. Suddenly I found myself scouring the internet for information about responsive images and semi-automating the image optimization process with a Babashka script interfacing with TinyPNGs API.

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Stumble upon in May 2024

While roaming the internet for information on different topics, I also found a few totally unrelated posts, but interesting nevertheless. I guess that’s what happens when you indulge:
I wonder what else they wrote about?

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S3 presigned URL generation with Babashka

A while back, I needed to generate presigned URLs for S3 objects in Amazon Web Services. I wanted to use Babashka (Clojure scripting), to avoid my painful friend from the past - Bash.

I looked all the usual places for a Clojure-friendly approach, but even Cognitect’s AWS API did not have any means to presign URLs. Everybody seemed to reluctantly tolerate having to use AWS Java SDK directly for presigning URLs.

— Java interop, oh joy 😣😅

Being forced to use AWS Java SDK would mean a no-go for Babashka. Also, based on how often similar questions pop up, I felt it deserved a better solution.

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Upload files to SharePoint using Babashka

My team and I were publishing a specific set of files several times weekly and we were obligated to put them on Microsoft SharePoint for non-technical people to be able to find them. After all, it is fair to not assume everyone knows their way around GitHub or how to run small pieces of code.

The tedious file upload to SharePoint was done manually until recently when Babashka came to the rescue and helped leverage our CI/CD pipeline.

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How to compare JSON files offline

At work, I needed to compare some huge (almost identical) JSON data structures.

Since the data was potentially sensitive, I wanted to do it offline. Sending data over the wire to one of the myriad of online services was a no-go.

There are probably built-in tools for IDE’s like VS Code, Emacs and the like, but I wanted something I could use on the Linux CLI

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