Being attached to a keyboard for up to 16 hours a day (on a busy day) definitely takes a toll on wrists. After experiencing intermittent pain in my fingers/wrists, I decided to splurge on the Kinesis Advantage2.

Day 1

Keyboard delivered. Immediately switch keyboards (from my Das Keyboard 4 with Cherry MX Blue) and try to finish the rest of my work. This thing feels weird. The keys are squishier than I like too.

Day 2

Typing slower than 6 year old me with "Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing!". I have lots of project deadlines coming up which hopefully will provide me with ample practice time.

I'm beginning to wonder if the keyboard placement on some of the keys were always off, or if I was typing wrong for 30 years.

Day 3

Looks longingly at lifeless Das Keyboard

Day 4

I can sort of touch type, but there's definitely a few patterns where I'm messing things up. Typing in chats and e-mails is okay, however for programming it's a little annoying. Productivity is definitely slower since I'm thinking more of where the key I want to press is.

• My work laptop is a Mac and the Command Key being on the right hand side has me using two hands for certain actions instead of stretching out my left hand like a contortionist
• It doesn't feel natural to highlight words with "Shift" + "Arrow" since my hand positioning is reversed
• I edit a lot of JSON formatted files, and the bracket ("[", "]") keys make me want to die
• With tmux I use the "`" key as the prefix key and I keep missing it
• In fact all of the bottom row keys (like the "Arrow" keys) I mistype frequently
• Using vim isn't bad except for using Ctrl + "[" as my escape
• I also keep missing the "X", "C", "V", "N", "M" keys since they're shifted ever so slightly from my Das Keyboard

On the plus side it feels easier (more accurate) to type if I lift my wrists slightly. Also I haven't felt any tinglyness.

Day 9

Worked from home for a couple of days. This keyboard is starting to feel pretty comfortable. Beginning to re-do shortcuts in OSX programs now that I have a better feel for the keys.

Day 11

Need to start to look into some key macros. This is might take a while since I use vi (or vi bindings) a lot and I don't want to interfere with those. Handling brackets would make my life a lot easier though.

Day 15

After using this for a while, I'm going to skip key macros. I keep switching between multiple OS's and I'm not 100% sure I want to commit to something right now.

Day 21

Went to work and used the work laptop keyboard. Since all of the keys are not in a matrix layout I keep mis-hitting the "C" and "V" keys...

Day 30

I think it's safe to say I feel like I've acclimated to the layout of the Advantage2. There's still room for improvement in my usage, but I'd like to use this more before figuring out what I want to rebind.

Overview

To sum up my experiences with the Advantage2...

Likes

• Wrist pain/numbness is gone while typing. Yay!
• It's easy to type quickly for standard documents (word docs/blogs/etc)

Dislikes

• Moving to other "standard" keyboard layouts takes a while to get used to, however it takes a couple of hours before I'm hitting keys accurately again.
• I code for a living, so certain keys I have to hit a lot are placed in a position that still feels a little awkward:
  • In particular, the "[", "]", "(", ")" and "`" are the ones I keep missing
  • If I mis-hit the key the first time, I usually get it on the second try.

Other

• There are some keys I still don't use often and will probably rebind. The "Home" and "End" keys are the biggest culprits, however the "Page Up" and "Page Down" keys also don't get a lot of use.
• I still haven't used this for any gaming... however I don't know if I'll find the time to. I'd probably switch back to the Das for that :).

As part of a migration test for some parallel work, I wanted to run tests locally instead of on the work Jenkins instance.

There are a few reasons for this:

• I don't have permissions to install any plugins
• I don't want to break anything I can't fix on a Friday

As far as tools to do this, I figured Docker was a good enough choice since I have it on my laptop... but also I was far too lazy to start a new VM.

Setting up (Local) Jenkins with Docker

I don't have any special instructions for setting up Jenkins master on a Docker host. However I did follow a tutorial for Jenkins BlueOcean which installs a local Jenkins instance via the docker run command and saves your Jenkins information via a mount.

The command to do this is below:

docker run \
    --rm \
    -u root \
    -p 8080:8080 \
    -v jenkins-data:/var/jenkins_home \ 
    -v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock \
    -v "$HOME":/home \ 
    jenkinsci/blueocean

Simple enough (right?). I should probably mention that I'm on Windows 10, so I substituted $USERPROFILE for $HOME. It seemed to work all the same though.

After clicking my way through the setup, I took that command and created a docker-compose.yml file in the same directory as my (newly created) jenkins-data folder:

version: '3.3'

services:
  jenkins-blueocean:
    image: jenkinsci/blueocean
    networks:
      jenkins:
        aliases:
          - jenkins
    ports:
      - 8080:8080
    user: root
    volumes:
      - "/var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock"
      - "./jenkins-data:/var/jenkins_home"
      - "$USERPROFILE:/home" # Windows 10 Again!

networks:
  jenkins:

Now it's possible to start up the Jenkins instance with docker-compose up -d.

This is great and all, however what I really want to do is test different parallel setups/plugins across a set of Jenkins slave nodes. How can we do that locally?

Creating a Docker image to use with (Local) Jenkins

The normal process people use to start up Jenkins slave nodes is to create a new machine then set up the machine to be connected to via SSH. If I'm far too lazy for a VM (via Vagrant), I'm far too lazy to click through menus to add a new node. Enter the Self-Organizing Swarm Modules Plugin.

The plugin works by starting a Java CLI client that discovers your Jenkins master and joins it. You can install via the Plugin Manager (currently it's on version 3.16).

Now to create the nodes. I needed a way to create new nodes easily, but scale them for my purposes. So I created a new Dockerfile and entered the following:

FROM ubuntu:latest

ENV SWARM_PLUGIN_VERSION=3.16

WORKDIR /var/run/jenkins
COPY . .
RUN apt-get update \
    && apt-get install -y default-jre git wget \
    && rm -rf /var/lib/apt/lists* \
    && wget "https://repo.jenkins-ci.org/releases/org/jenkins-ci/plugins/swarm-client/${SWARM_PLUGIN_VERSION}/swarm-client-${SWARM_PLUGIN_VERSION}.jar" \
    && chmod 755 entrypoint.sh

ENTRYPOINT [ "./entrypoint.sh" ]

This will perform the following:

• Use latest Ubuntu server (I'm more familiar with it)
• Update/Install Java/Git/wget
• Download the swarm-client for version 3.16
• Run the entrypoint.sh script.

Well, now I need an entrypoint.sh script...

#!/bin/bash

java -jar "swarm-client-$SWARM_PLUGIN_VERSION.jar" \
	-master "http://jenkins:8080/" \
    -name "$HOSTNAME" -labels "$HOSTNAME" \
    -username "my-jenkins-user" -password "my-jenkins-password"

This will start the plugin via Java, set the name/label to the container $HOSTNAME and try to connect the Jenkins master.

Bringing it all together

Docker is all about containerization of apps and just starting this randomly isn't going to have everything magically work. To do this, let's modify our docker-compose.yml file one last time

version: '3.3'

services:
  jenkins-blueocean:
    image: jenkinsci/blueocean
    networks:
      jenkins:
        aliases:
          - jenkins
    ports:
      - 8080:8080
    user: root
    volumes:
      - "/var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock"
      - "./jenkins-data:/var/jenkins_home"
      - "$USERPROFILE:/home"

  jenkins-node:
    build: ./jenkins-node
    image: jenkins-node
    networks:
      jenkins: {}

networks:
  jenkins:

Now if everything somehow worked smoothly, you should be able to run the following commands:

docker-compose up -d jenkins-blueocean
docker-compose up --build -d --scale jenkins-node=6

And your Jenkins Executor Status should look like this (6 nodes!):

I would never run a production environment like this (hence why I put "Local" before Jenkins), however to test things like Lockable Resources and 100 parallel jobs it's kind of nice to have. At least I won't break our critical jobs (again).

I intend to use this to hold any random thoughts that I deem interesting. I could probably try to use twitter instead but that's not gonna happen.

Hopefully I can keep this up for over a few months this time.