Filipe Afonso

Challenging times and new personal project!

Mon, 17 Aug 2020 22:00:00 +0000

Hey everyone, it has been a while! But I feel that this blog post is long overdue =)

Given the current context that we are living in, with all the concerns and challenges we are facing, there are loads of reasons to be stressed and concerned.

But as usual, crises and threads also bring new opportunities, opportunities to do something different, something new and innovative. Something that could help to keep you going and mentally sane. I would like to encourage everyone to find their own personal projects or hobby that can be this small sparkle of light in your life, and maybe bring you something new.

On this note, and to give you some inspiration, let me share with you my new personal project, that you can find on this youtube channel.

I’ve been playing chromatic accordion for more than 20 years, and it represents a big and important part of my life. So I’ve decided to start sharing my little knowledge about it with the world, with the goal to spread some of the Portuguese traditional folk music (don’t worry, I also have other styles of music there), helping other accordionists to learn some new tunes and most importantly, entertain the audience!

I truly hope you enjoy the channel and my music, and if so, please don’t forget to subscribe the channel.

Thank you so much and see you soon!

Webinars and Liferay Devcon! what next?

Sun, 05 Nov 2017 22:00:00 +0000

I know it has been a long time since my last blog post, but the truth is that it has been a crazy year with so many things happening that I haven’t been able to invest any time to write about anything.

Anyway, now everything is settling down and getting back to normality, and as so, I’m hoping to have time to share with you some cool ideas that I’ve been cooking, as I’m doing some experiments with Liferay + WeDeploy + AI + OCR.

In the meanwhile, let me share with you some of the work that I’ve been doing throughout this year.

1) I’ve done a webinar series about Liferay DXP, covering topics like cloud, dockers, mobile first approach, intranets and upgrades. You can find these webinars here:

2) I’ve also done my first talk in a conference ever! Me and my coleague Carlos Hernandez talked in Liferay Decon 2017 about Liferay DXP + Machine Learning working togheter. It was a great experience and you can find our talk here.

And that’s it! I’ll try hard to come back to blogging again with interesting topics and ideas to share with you guys. See you soon ;)

Quick Liferay VM - New Version Available!

Sun, 11 Sep 2016 22:00:00 +0000

Great news! a fresh new version of our Liferay Quick VM Setup project is now available!

Powered by Vagrant + Puppet, this project will allow you to rampup a VM running Liferay DXP from scratch, with all the required dependencies.

Some of the major changes for this new version are:

Added Liferay Portal 7 CE GA3 by default (Liferay 6.2 CE has a new branch now and can still be used);
Java 8;
New option to install external services as OpenOffice and ImageMagick;
Apache2 with configuration for compression;
Several minor bugfixes and improvements.

As a final note, if by any chance you will be by Bratislava (19th October) or Prague (20th October) and you want to learn more about Liferay DXP, you can’t miss this event. I’ll be one of the speakers and we’ll be showing the great potential of Liferay DXP. I hope to see you there!

JDBC Ping Configuration for PostgreSQL

Sun, 07 Aug 2016 10:00:00 +0000

If you are trying to get your cluster to work over unicast, if you are using PostgreSQL as database and if you are trying to figure it out the right configurations to use, look no more, you arrived to the right place!

As you probably already know, JGroups offers you several options for cluster members discovery, some good examples are TCP_Ping, S3_Ping, File_Ping and JDBC_Ping. Not going to deep on why choosing one option over the other, one thing you should keep in mind is the dynamic aspect of this process. Usually, you want to be able to add or remove cluster nodes dynamically without having to change any configurations on your system, and to achieve that, you can use any of the last three options (TCP_Ping is more static in the sense that you will need to specify the hosts of all your cluster members).

As JDBC_Ping is a good option to use for discovery and I recently needed to configure it with PostgreSQL DB, and also didn’t find anything on the web about the required configuration with the specifics for this database engine, I thought it could be useful to leave here the end result of it.

What you will need to do is to add this JDBC_Ping configuration section to your JGroups XML configuration file:

<JDBC_PING  connection_url="jdbc:postgresql://<DB_SERVER_IP>:5432/<DB_NAME>" 
    connection_username="<DB_USER>"
    connection_password="<DB_PASSWORD>"
    connection_driver="org.postgresql.Driver"
    initialize_sql="CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS JGROUPSPING (
                   own_addr varchar(200) NOT NULL,
                   bind_addr varchar(200) NOT NULL,
                   created timestamp NOT NULL,
                   cluster_name varchar(200) NOT NULL,
                   ping_data BYTEA,
                   constraint PK_JGROUPSPING PRIMARY KEY (own_addr, cluster_name)
                   )"
   insert_single_sql="INSERT INTO JGROUPSPING (own_addr, bind_addr, created, cluster_name, ping_data) values (?,'${jgroups.tcp.address:127.0.0.1}',NOW(), ?, ?)"
   delete_single_sql="DELETE FROM JGROUPSPING WHERE own_addr=? AND cluster_name=?"
   select_all_pingdata_sql="SELECT ping_data FROM JGROUPSPING WHERE cluster_name=?" />

And hopefully, you are ready to go! you can find more about JDBC_Ping configuration here (Example: how to use datasource instead of connection url).

Java meetup Dublin

Sun, 10 Jul 2016 16:00:00 +0000

It is happening and is powered by Liferay!!!

14th July 2016 - Save the date

We are working and giving our best to setup a fantastic evening for you all, with an amazing Java meetup here in Dublin, with interesting talks, pizza and some beer :)

I’ll be talking about what you can achieve with configuration management tools like Vagrant and Puppet in your daily work as a developer or consultant.

Feel free to join us, I’m sure it will be an funny evening. More details here

Looking forward to see you there!

Configuration Management Tools, let the magic begin!

Sun, 15 Nov 2015 00:18:00 +0000

I’ve been talking a little bit about this topic in my previous blog posts, but in the last few months, I’ve been really impressed with this new (at least for me) configuration management tools thing, and now I’m completely surrendered to it! Therefore I want to share with you my thoughts and experience about this new work approach that can make your life easier, when it comes to getting your specific environment, which is using those technologies with that specific and tricky configuration which you need to do again and again, every time you need to set up your environment, for you or for your team mate.

In this article, I will try to show you the key advantages of using a (or a set of) configuration management tools.

There are lots of new cool technologies in the context of configuration management and virtual environments, tools like Puppet, Vagrant, Docker, Chef and so on.

For my particular case and needs, I’ve chosen to use Vagrant with Puppet for provisioning and now, everytime that I need some new technology or some new specific environment with some particular configuration, I start to think about how can I achieve it using these two technologies. With this approach, I get an easy, portable and consistent way to create my work environments, easily reproducible and with great flexibility: you can start your environment, stop it, do some crazy experiments on it, destroy it and start all over again with just one command line like “Vagrant up”.

Some key features and aspects of this approach are:

Using Vagrant with Virtual Box, you can get a completly isolated VM where you will be able to install everything you need, leaving your laptop clean and simple, with the minimum set of indispensable software;
Vagrant offers some really cool and easy to use features like managing the amount of CPU and memory for your VM, port mapping and share folders between host and guest machine;
Using Vagrant with an Hashicorp account, you can easily expose your VM over the web and give someone access to your applications, anywhere in the world - Can be useful to show to someone that functionality you’ve been working on;
Puppet is a really interesting and flexible technology to handle your system configuration, installing and configuring software, it’s just like you are coding your own infrastructure;
Vagrant and Puppet configuration files are simple, typically small and they can easily be managed with your source in you favorite version control system;
When you need to install some new software, performe some configurations or just do something with puppet, take a look on Puppet Forge first, they have lots of puppet modules that you can leverage on to achieve your end result - Do not reinvent the wheel.

I know that by using these technologies it seems that you will have some overload in your work (because you will need to setup all your puppet and vagrant files), but in the long run, you will end up saving time. You’ll only have to setup the environment one time, at the beginning of the project! from there on, all that you need to do is to run a command line and your environment will be recreated all over again from scratch. In the end, you will achieve a less error prone environment, ensuring that all your environments have the same software with the same configurations, easy to share with your team and easy to adapt to new scenarios.

To finish this article, I just want talk a little bit about some of my projects where I’m using these technologies and that you can leverage on to create you own enviroments, try out this technologies or simply take a look on some examples:

Liferay box will give you the option to have a VM running Liferay with some really cool configuration options like: cluster, web server, external SOLR search engine, firewall, and so on;
Jekyll box will create for you a VM running Jekyll. I’ve talked about this project on my previous blog post;
Scala box is a simple project to creat a VM ready to run your scala scripts.

Places to look for more information:

If you are not familiar with Vagrant, it is a good idea to go through this tuturial;
Vagrant and Puppet tutorial.

I hope that you’ve found this information useful and have fun with your DevOps!

Working with Jekyll? Get your dev environment!

Sun, 04 Oct 2015 21:00:00 +0000

In this post I will talk about how you can easily get a development environment with everything you need to run and test your Jekyll site, and all in an isolated VM, how cool is that?!

Long story short, during my adventure to build this site and learn about how to work with Jekyll, I felt the need to have my own development environment to check my changes and blog posts before send them live to GitHub. At the same time, I was playing around with Vagrant and Puppet and voilà! I started to work on a project to get a Vagrant VM, using Puppet to configure everything you need to build and serve you Jekyll site.

All you need to do is to get the project here and include it in your Jekyll project. Quick notes about that:

The GitHub readme file of the project will help you setting things up;
If you are not familiar with Vagrant, it is a good idea to go through this tuturial;

Don’t miss other cool things I’ve discovered and some good resources about Jekyll in my previous blog post.

I hope that you’ve found this information useful and have fun!

Jekyll and more

Sun, 13 Sep 2015 19:23:00 +0000

During the process of building this site, I’ve found some good resources and learned about some interesting technologies which I want to share with you here as it can be a good starting point for you:

Jekyll
GitHub Pages
Tutorial - Good tutorial to start learning about building your blog using GitHub Pages and Jekyll
Jekyll Themes - Great Jekyll themes collection
Mediator Theme - Great theme by Dirk Fabisch!
Easy Development Environment - Project that uses Vagrant and Puppet to easily get a VM with Jekyll and everything you need to get your development environment

Hope this post can point you in the right direction to learn a little bit more about Jekyll and some related technologies.

Have fun and see you soon!

Welcome!

Sun, 13 Sep 2015 17:44:00 +0000

Finally, after something like 9 years of IT experience, I’ve decided to create my personal page to share some interesting bits and thoughts.

So, here it is my first blog post and hopefully many more will follow.

Stay tuned and see you soon!