Blog - Roelof Jan Elsinga

Keep it simple, stupid

Writing simple code is one of the best skills you can have as a software developer. Simple code is easier to extend, debug, and maintain. "Keep it simple, stupid" doesn't just apply to design, but also to software development. Knowing this principle will make you a better developer over time.

Posted on: March 28th, 2021

growth

SEO & Neo4j: Internal link building through relationships

Internal link building is a great way to signal to search engines which pages are the most important to you on your website. In this post, I'm going over 3 iterations of internal link building I've implemented in the past 18 months and how I've tried to make increasingly more relevant links between pieces of content.

Posted on: January 6th, 2021

neo4j seo database

My 2020 in review

2020 has been a strange year for us all, but I don't want to linger on the negatives this year has brought. Instead, I'd like to highlight everything that went well for me. In this post, I'll highlight everything I've learned this year and everything I'm proud of.

Posted on: December 30th, 2020

growth

Asciidoc and Asciidoctor: Write an e-book with code

Markdown is a simplistic markup language to focus on the content instead of the individual elements, but it's also very limited. You can use Asciidoc to accomplish the same simplicity while still being able to create more complex structures. In this post, we're going over how you can convert an Asciidoc file to a PDF book.

Posted on: December 3rd, 2020

asciidoc ebook

Setting up your development environment with Ansible

Setting up your development environment with Ansible is a great way to save yourself and your colleagues headaches. Creating an Ansible Playbook helps you to keep everyone on your team in the same environment and makes switching machines an easy task, not a chore.

Posted on: November 25th, 2020

ansible

How to create a simple MQTT switch in Home Assistant

When you're using Home Assistant for your home automation and you've got a few MQTT devices you might want to create simple switches for your devices. However, if you're like me, this simple task turned out to be a very tough task. In this post we're going to create a visual toggle for your MQTT devices.

Posted on: November 18th, 2020

homeassistant mqtt

Fixing hidden infrastructure issues with Netdata

Netdata has helped me to fix a major issue by pointing me in the right direction. By visualizing the issues that were happening, it helped me to find and fix a major issue within the first hour of deploying Netdata across the different nodes in the platform architecture.

Posted on: September 23rd, 2020

debugging netdata

Learning Go: What I've learned in 9 months

In January of 2020, I started learning Go. In these past 9 months, I've been able to build multiple applications to contribute to faster applications, easier deployments, and more stability in the infrastructure. In this post, I go over what I've built and what I learned.

Posted on: September 17th, 2020

go growth

GraphQL: Centralize existing REST API endpoints for easier development

API gateways are great for development teams, because they expose the data you need for all kinds of different purposes in a central location. So why not create an API gateway with GraphQL and use it to bring all your REST endpoints in 1 place?

Posted on: August 26th, 2020

go graphql

Ansible: Easy and Safe SSH deployments from GitHub

Deploying your applications from GitHub using SSH doesn't have to be difficult and you don't have to give your remote machine access to your entire GitHub account either. In this post, we're going over using SSH through Deploy keys to only give your remote machine pull access to a single repository to deploy your application safely.

Posted on: August 19th, 2020

github ansible ssh