Blog

I am easily distracted by all the cool things I get to do and I often forget to write blog posts. But when I do, they'll show up here.

Speeding Up Page Loads with Prefetch

3/30/2025

4 min read

In the previous post, I explained how I built my "Jekyll Compatible" blog engine in NextJS. At the end of the post, I pointed out some performance concerns related to the server actions and markdown parsing within the request. I'd like to explain how I used the "Prefetch" feature in the NextJS router to help make the site feel faster.

Moving from Jekyll to NextJS

3/19/2025

14 min read

For over a decade I used Jekyll to power mikeheijmans.com and publish the occasional blog post. It turns out I'm pretty bad at consistently blogging and I always wanted my personal website to be more of a playground and showcase of things I play with in my free time. I'm a huge fan of NextJS and it seemed like a great engine for what I wanted for mikeheijmans.com. The missing piece was "jekyll-like" blogging. There are many ways to do it, this is how I did it.

Coralogix, OpenTelemetry, NextJS, and Vercel OH MY!

7/30/2024

10 min read

I've been working on a project that uses Coralogix for observability. The project is a NextJS app deployed on Vercel that talks to serverless apis running as AWS Lambdas. I wanted to share some of the things I learned along the way and hopefully help someone else out with all the things I had to figure out (so far).

Encrypt It!

6/25/2018

2 min read

Today I was presented with a common problem: I have a private key file I must distribute to my team members securely. How do I do it? My first thought is that I could email it to them all, but our email is retained for quite a long time and isn't a secure mechanism regardless. Then I thought I'd use a file share, but that seemed less ideal given that access wasn't controlled by me directly and who knows who could end up getting access one day.

Raspberry Pi for Halloween Props

10/27/2017

6 min read

For the past five years my wife and I have built increasingly elaborate props for our yard and charity haunted house. We make a great team because I enjoy building the mechanical, electronic, and software pieces to make things run and she, as a designer, enjoys making the mechanisms I...

Simplified Kafka Streaming Processors For Sorting

1/17/2017

8 min read

After a week of poking and prodding at the Kafka streams API and reading through tons of docs and confusing examples I have finally distilled it down to its simplest form and I think I can help all the people, like me, out there struggling to understand how to make...

My Clever Docker Environment Loading Solution Using Vault

9/28/2016

4 min read

The Problem, You have a dockerized application that needs 50+ environment variables that are different based on the execution environment. Let me explain how I made this completely painless with some clever design and hashicorp's vault

Setting Up Your Own Private Docker Registry

5/18/2016

6 min read

If you want to run your own Docker Registry using registry-v2 this post is for you! Its pretty simple but there are a few gotchas you need to know about. The purpose of this blog post is to help you past the problems so you experience the joy of setting up and having your own private docker registry at little to no cost (depending on if you want to purchase SSL certs or not.)

Understanding Equity Offers for Mere Mortals

3/14/2016

11 min read

A lot of friends and colleague over the years have asked me to explain this to them and I figured it was time to write a blog post about it so that more people can see how I personally approach equity offerings presented with an employment contract.

How Early DevOps Investment Greased the Wheels of Acquisition

11/16/2015

1 min read

Once upon a time there was a company that during acquisition was presented with hundreds of due diligence questions as well as SOX compliance requirements. This story is how a team were covered through their early investment in DevOps disciplines, mindsets, and processes. Learn how to subscribe to DevOps practices automatically, build in resiliency, checks & balances, reproducibility, system and user auditing, and more.

Why I Ditched DockerHub's Automated Builds

9/18/2015

5 min read

If you've created Docker containers and put them on the central registry then you know that you can have DockerHub do the builds for you using the "Automated Build" feature. This is a great feature for maintaining relatively stable projects with infrequent changes but if you're living the agile life and iterating quick and often, you're going to find yourself wanting more.

Automated Docker Deployments with CircleCI

9/7/2015

4 min read

Over the weekend I decided to setup one of my opensource projects to build its docker image, push it to the registry, and deploy that new container to my digital ocean server using CircleCI. It turned out to be super simple and I wanted to share all the details

SSL Cert Generation for Amazon ELB

1/31/2015

6 min read

After doing a security audit of our webapp, we discovered that our SSL certs and settings needed some updating. One of the most major things was that the certs where generated using SHA1 which is dangerously weak and becomes more so every day.

Fun with Git Aliases

10/13/2014

4 min read

Git is awesome! That goes without saying, but with aliases you can make it more awesome. These are some of the aliases I'm using to make my life with Git a little easier. Let's first talk about aliases and what they are. The concept of aliases is as old as Bash....

Managing Chef with Codeship

9/19/2014

7 min read

I'm deeply passionate about Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment practices. I don't consider a project to be "ready for production" until I have it building and deploying on its own. *(this includes proper test coverage that can make sure the automation doesn't push bunk code out)* At [Niche](http://www.niche.co), we use hosted Chef...

How I Broke Prod with Encrypted Data Bags

9/5/2014

5 min read

Chef has so many ways of working with data, some people call it "getting Chefed in the face". Well, I got "Chefed" in the ass last week with encrypted data bags

My First Week Back in the Startup Life

9/4/2014

3 min read

Last week was my first week working in the small tech startup world again. If you read my last post, you know that I left my corporate cubicle job at a large and prominent web company for a job at a small tech startup

3 Ways Resigning is Like a Breakup

8/27/2014

4 min read

I recently decided to change jobs and move on to a startup after 6+ years at my job with a large (and prominent) web corporation. I've learned a ton in my time there but it seemed to be the right time for me to move on to something new for...

Apple's Thunderbolt Display is Junk

8/18/2014

2 min read

My current work setup is a 15" MacBook Pro Retina connected to a 27" Apple Thunderbolt Retina display. I will start off by saying that the Thunderbolt display is a very pretty display and the colors are crisp and clean... when it works

Proxy SSH Over SOCKS (the easy way)

8/12/2014

3 min read

Today I had a strange problem. I needed to work with an internal git repo behind a firewall from my home on my personal laptop. The git server only allows SSH connections (git@git.corp.example.com) and doesn't support HTTP requests.

Lengthen the Rope

8/8/2014

2 min read

The DevOps culture is one of late nights and early mornings. Its a culture rooted in the good old days of SysAdmin cowboys and cowgirls. We were the computer hackers and miracle workers. Never content with the tools we had, we built bigger and better tools to facilitate our laziness...

Hyper-Collaboration is not Innovation

8/6/2014

4 min read

There is a fallacy that remote workers can't collaborate effectively. Time and time again I hear that collaboration is something that only thrives in an office environment where everyone is sitting in the same room and working. I want to clear a few things up here.