Long-form writing on software development, rules engines, the history of computing in Armenia, and the process of digitising old books.
What real attacks on cloud backups tell us about keeping the recovery copy in the same Azure subscription as production — where immutability holds, where a subscription boundary helps, where only a separate tenant does, and what the regulators and frameworks actually ask for
Wiring commit-driven releases so the version number actually means something — the misconfiguration that made every release a minor bump for months, the separation between version calculator and changelog generator, and the CI permissions that block every first attempt
A design constraint for disaster recovery tooling — resolve every restore against a configuration snapshot captured before the incident, never against a live query — and what falls out of it: pure-function planning, fully offline tests, and drills cheap enough to run continuously
What happened when I pointed a shared AI merge-request reviewer at an architecture repository containing no code — separating the mechanical gates from the judgement checks, forbidding fabrication, and the style rule that would have broken the build
How I standardised commit messages and changelogs across a polyglot workspace — Conventional Commits enforced by a shared shell hook, Lefthook to manage the hooks, Keep a Changelog as the format, and git-cliff to generate the changelog from history and keep it current in CI
A follow-up to the Conventional Commits post — rolling out automated semantic versioning, changelog updates and GitHub Releases with git-cliff in GitHub Actions across ten repositories, and the gotchas found on the way: release commits polluting the changelog, GITHUB_TOKEN loop protection, and a branch-protected main
How I built a composable pipeline to take physical book scans through OCR, automated cleaning, AI copy-editing, and Vellum layout — and packaged it as a reusable toolchain with a step-by-step tutorial.
How a routine margin reset overrode the owl selector and made all my prose paragraphs run together — and the one-line fix.
How to use Hugo's layout key to give a standalone page its own template, rather than bending a shared layout with conditionals.
How to build a floating thumbnail tooltip for Leaflet photo markers — shared DOM element, edge-flip positioning, hover delays, and keyboard accessibility.
Why the 'first tap previews, second tap acts' pattern is broken on touch devices, and what to do instead.
A lightweight, zero-dependency test that walks your Hugo content tree and catches broken image paths before they reach production.
Drools is no longer the only game in town. A look at Easy Rules, RuleBook, and when you should reach for a rules engine at all.
How to stamp a copyright notice onto every image at Hugo build time using images.Text — including the font trap, the shadow technique for readability, and how to keep multiple shortcodes in sync.
How to replace browser-side EXIF GPS reading with a pre-build Node script that embeds coordinates directly in the HTML — faster maps, no async loading, no browser EXIF parsing.
A collection of non-obvious traps in Hugo's image processing pipeline: the ASCII-only default font, the strings.TrimLeft argument order, stale image caches, and why two shortcodes processing the same image can produce different URLs.
How to build an interactive map for a Hugo static site that reads GPS coordinates directly from image EXIF data and plots photo markers alongside a GPX route — with all the gotchas.
Switching the blog to Hugo on GitHub Pages after years on various platforms.
Armenia's pivotal role in developing computers in the Soviet Union — written in preparation for an Armenian Institute event on Women in Science.
In 2020, the Armenian Institute republished I Ask You, Ladies and Gentlemen by Leon Surmelian. This is the story of how I got involved in digitising it.
The KIE Workbench REST API lets you automate project setup in a fresh container — useful when VirtualBox keeps changing your IP address.
Connecting a Spring Boot application to two separate databases with Spring Data JPA, working around Boot's default autowiring behaviour.
Just the essentials: a Spring Boot application exposing a Drools rules engine as an HTTP API, nothing more.
The Maven Shade plugin bundles all dependencies into a single fat jar — handy for deploying libraries into Drools Guvnor or running self-contained FitNesse fixtures.
A reference project wiring Spring and Drools without the heavyweight KIE integration — hand-cranked and straightforward.
Drools's built-in sum accumulator silently converts BigDecimals to doubles. A custom accumulator to fix that before it corrupts your financial calculations.
A Ruby script to parse the Nexus REST API and reliably fetch the latest snapshot artifact, sidestepping the timestamped filename problem.
Configuring a Spring application with two separate data sources using Spring Data JPA — separate @Configuration classes and EntityManagerFactory beans for each schema.
First impressions of Apache Camel for implementing Enterprise Integration Patterns — a content-based router and a CSV-to-XML transform with almost no code.
Useful WLST resources and Gist examples for scripting WebLogic domain creation and server administration.
BEA's Jython-based scripting tool for automating WebLogic server administration — create domains, manage deployments, and handle disaster recovery without restarting.