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content/archived/_index.md

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+paginate_by = 4
+path = "/archived"
+title = "Archived"
+sort_by = "date"
+template = "section.html"
+insert_anchor_links = "left"
+
+[extra]
+show_previous_next_article_links = true
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content/archived/all-good-things-come-to-an-end.md

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+title = "All Good Things Come to an End"
+description = "After having spent the last seven years organizing technical talks at several meetups I have decided to step down and move on."
+date = 2021-04-14T12:03:44-07:00
+
+[taxonomies]
+tags = ["meetup", "conference", "talks"]
+categories = ["Announcements"]
+
+[extra]
+toc = true
+keywords = ["meetup", "conference", "technical talks", "events", "organizer"]
++++
+
+{{ youtube(id="1CU5UPi7STk") }}
+
+After having spent the last seven years organizing technical talks at several meetups I have decided to step down and move on. It is an end of an era for me, but I am excited about what's next.
+
+I want to take this opportunity to thank all of my co-organizers, all of the speakers I hosted and all the attendees for supporting my efforts to help all of us learn from each other and be a community.
+
+### What Meetup groups I am stepping down from
+
+- SF Scala
+- SF Java
+- SF Elastic User Group
+- Bay Area Nix/NixOS User Group
+- SF Spark and Friends
+- Bay Area Ai
+- GraphQL By the Bay
+- Vancouver Scala
+
+Of course the above meetup groups will continue with my co-organizers moving it forward without me.
+
+### What will happen to [SF Bay Area techies](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCx317LNd-AlbTcE_0FkdJcg)
+
+- The [San Francisco Bay Area Techies YouTube Channel](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCx317LNd-AlbTcE_0FkdJcg) will live forever, hosting recordings of some of the technical talks I had organized.
+- The sfbayareatechies.com website will be shutdown.
+- The sfbayareatechies twitter, slack, discord and clubhouse club will be shutdown.
+
+### What is next for me
+
+I have a passion to learn, share my knowledge and to code, so I will be spending my freed up to time to contribute more to various open source projects and create my own content to share my learnings, which will include (but not limited to):
+
+- Writing more blogs here
+- Recording screencasts for my new [YouTube Channel](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCMjtB4EHujxHO2DB3FQ_obQ) <--- PLEASE SUBSCRIBE 🙏 !!!
+- Doing more talks at Conferences
+
+### Keep in touch
+
+Keep in touch all, lets get together sometime for a happy hour (be it virtual or in person (post covid)) and maybe even lets do some pair/mob programming together.
+
+Thank you 🙏🍷 All !
+

content/archived/announcing-sfbayareatech/index.md

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+title = "Life changes and announcing SFBayAreaTech"
+description = "Me and family moved, I changed jobs and announcing SFBayAreaTech a slack community for anyone working in tech who are based in the San Francisco Bay Area California"
+date = 2018-08-10T07:29:10-07:00
+
+[taxonomies]
+tags = ["sfbayareatechies"]
+categories = ["announcements"]
+
+[extra]
+toc = true
+keywords = ["sfbayareatech", "san francisco", "bay area", "california"]
++++
+
+#### Update: Since writing this blog, I have changed jobs and SFBayAreaTech has changed to <https://www.sfbayareatechies.com> ####
+
+2018 has been a fabulous year so far. Me and [family moved to the San Francisco bay area](https://www.rahmanian.xyz/post/goodbye-virginia-and-hello-san-fransisco-bay-area/) realizing my life long dream and our family goals. 
+
+It is absolutely an awesome experience living in the Bay Area amongst so many super smart techies and great startups. On arrival I had two initial goals, namely, meet everyone in tech and make friends and find a new awesome job with a startup that has a great future and potential solving problems that line up well with my interests and technical interests.
+
+On the job front I am excited to have joined [Mya Systems](https://hiremya.com/) based in the heart of San Francisco. I started at Mya in May 2018 so I feel I have been there long enough now to know now if it is a good fit for my goals and I am happy to report that I am enjoying my work a lot at Mya and the icing on the cake is the culture and people are awesome to work with. I genuinely like everyone I work with at work (this is a bold statement from a cynical Englishman in San Francisco who believes in the law of sods).
+
+At Mya we are building an A.I. recruiting assistant. I am pretty excited about this as the problem we are solving I can resonate with really well. Everytime I have looked for a job there has been many points of frustration for me where I felt the recruiter hasn't either kept me in the loop or got back to me in a timely fashion. It's not their fault, they are busy dealing with multiple candidates, doing interviews, arranging interviews and many other things, so an A.I assistant helping them and keeping me the candidate in the loop is win win situation where it reduces the load on the recruiter and avoids any frustration by me the candidate. Hence I predict a very bright future and success for Mya and I'm so glad to have been given the opportunity to join such an awesome company.
+
+On to my goal of meeting everyone in tech and making some friends I have been going to a lot of tech meetups and conferences since arriving in San Francisco and I'm loving the learnings and networking. I even am co-organizer for two meetups already in the bay area [SF Scala](https://www.meetup.com/SF-Scala/) and [Elasticsearch San Francisco](https://www.meetup.com/Elasticsearch-San-Francisco/). I have met some great people including key contributors to many open source projects and tech celebrities that I have followed for years that I finally got the chance to meet in person (see if you recognize any of them in the pictures below):
+
+![Tech celebrities](announcing_sfbayareatech.png)
+
+One thing I noticed though, was that it was difficult to stay in touch with everyone. I mean we are all busy aren't we after all. I thought how can I improve this. I realized I keep in touch with people at work really well by using Slack. So I thought, wouldn't be nice to have a slack for everyone else in Tech who have any kind of affiliation to San Franscisco Bay Area? Thinking more about this I thought this would make things easier as we already have slack on our laptops and phones for work so adding another slack workspace is easy. 
+
+So I created a slack workspace for everyone in tech who lives or works in the San Francisco Bay area. 
+
+You can join it here:
+
+### [Join SFBayAreaTech](https://www.sfbayareatech.xyz/)
+
+I urge you all to join and lets have some fun sharing knowledge, jokes, events and simply enjoying conversation with our peers everywhere and not just with people at work. 
+
+In the interest of transparency can I just confirm that I am doing this so we can all keep in touch better. I have no commercial motive for this.
+
+I do need everyones help though please join and spread the word to everyone you know. I look forward to speaking with you all on Slack soon.
+
+### Import Update 
+
+[Important announcement April 2021](/post/all-good-things-come-to-an-end/)
+

content/archived/migrating-from-pelican-to-hugo.md

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+title = "Migrating from Pelican to Hugo"
+description = "In this post I will discuss the steps I took to migrate my blog from Pelican to Hugo."
+date = "2015-11-29T07:16:53-05:00"
+
+[taxonomies]
+tags = ["blog"]
+categories = ["Blogging"]
+
+[extra]
+toc = true
+keywords = ["pelican",  "hugo",  "golang", "go", "python", "blog"]
++++
+
+In this post I will discuss the steps I took to migrate my blog from [Pelican](http://blog.getpelican.com/) to [Hugo](http://gohugo.io/).
+
+## Goal
+
+|    | Original Blog  | New Blog |
+| --- | --- | --- |
+| Static site generator | [Pelican](http://blog.getpelican.com/) | [Hugo](http://gohugo.io/) |
+| Hosting | [Linode](https://www.linode.com/) | [Amazon S3](https://aws.amazon.com/s3/) |
+| Deployment Strategy | Manual using git | Automated using [Wercker](http://wercker.com/) |
+| Source Control | [bitbucket](https://bitbucket.org/) | [GitHub](https://github.com/softinio/softinio.com) |
+
+## Installing Hugo
+
+I do all of my development on an Apple Macbook Pro so I used homebrew to install Hugo:
+
+```bash
+brew install hugo
+```
+
+## Creating my project
+
+Its up to you how you organize your project, but as I am a Go Language developer and Hugo is built using Go I have created a folder for this project here:
+
+```bash
+$GOPATH/src/github.com/softinio/softinio.com
+```
+
+change directory to this and in terminal run (for the rest of this blog I will assume you are in this directory):
+
+```bash
+git init
+```
+
+This will create a git repository for your project.
+
+## Create Hugo Site
+
+To create your new Hugo site in terminal run:
+
+```bash
+hugo new site $GOPATH/src/github.com/softinio/softinio.com
+```
+
+This will create the skeleton for your new Hugo site.
+
+## Choosing a theme
+
+First I headed over to the themes showcase for hugo here: [Hugo Themes](http://themes.gohugo.io/). This has screenshots and links to demo sites for each theme.
+
+I chose [hyde-x](http://themes.gohugo.io/hyde-x/) for my blog.
+
+Make a subdirectory called `themes` and change directory to it and clone the theme you have chosen there:
+
+```bash
+git clone https://github.com/zyro/hyde-x
+```
+
+Once this theme repo got cloned into my project I then removed its `.git` directory by changing directory into the themes root folder and removing it:
+
+```bash
+cd themes/hyde-x
+rm -fr .git
+```
+
+## Configuring your project and theme
+
+In the root of your project there is a file called `config.toml` that you need to update to configure your site. You can look at [my configuration](https://github.com/softinio/softinio.com/blob/master/config.toml) to get an idea of the things you can set. For your theme specific settings of course look at the github repo for your theme's readme for detailsi (e.g. for my chosen theme: [hyde-x documentation](https://github.com/zyro/hyde-x/blob/master/README.md)).
+
+## Content Types, Archetypes and Front Matter
+
+I have decided to have two content types:
+
+- `post` for my blog posts
+- `page` for my sites static pages (like my about me page).
+
+When creating any kind of content using Hugo you must provide some meta data about it. This meta data is known as `front matter`.
+
+For example my `front matter` for this post is:
+
+```
++++
+categories = ["python", "golang"]
+date = "2015-11-29T07:16:53-05:00"
+description = "In this post I will discuss the steps I took to migrate my blog from Pelican to Hugo."
+keywords = ["pelican",  "hugo",  "golang", "go", "python", "blog"]
+slug = "migrating-from-pelican-to-hugo"
+tags = ["pelican",  "hugo",  "golang", "go", "python", "blog"]
+title = "Migrating from Pelican to Hugo"
+
++++
+```
+
+You can get Hugo to automatically create the above front matter for you for each content type. These are called `archetypes`. If you look at the `archetypes` subdirectory of my project there are two archetypes `default.md` and `page.md`. Any content created that is of type `page` will have the contents of `page.md` added to its header. Any other content type will have the content of `default.md` added to its header.
+
+Looking at the content of `page.md` we have:
+
+```
++++
+title = ""
+slug = ""
+description = ""
+menu = "main"
+keywords = [""]
+categories = [""]
+tags = [""]
++++
+```
+
+So this will be added to the top of every content of type page that I add. Of course I will have to edit this template for each content with that contents specific meta data.
+
+The main difference between my two different content types is that the `page.md` content type has `menu = "main"` this tells hugo that this content is not a blog post and it should be added to the left column of my website below my name as a link.
+
+## Creating Content
+
+To create content, from the project root you call:
+
+`hugo new <content type>/<name of new content md file>`
+
+So to create this page I did:
+
+`hugo new post/migrating-from-pelican-to-hugo.md`
+
+So to migrate my blog posts from pelican to hugo I used to above command to create a post with same file name as I had in pelican, copy and pasted the contents of each file from my pelican project to my hugo project. Note that of course I did not copy the front matter of my pelican posts across. Instead I updated the hugo front matter with the same meta data as I had in pelican manually. I repeated this process for my pages too.
+
+## Permalinks
+
+ My permalinks structure for my old pelican based blog was:
+
+`/blog/<slug>`
+
+meaning to access my a post it would have URL like:
+
+`http://www.softinio.com/blog/<slug>`
+
+In hugo I have changed this to:
+
+`/post/<slug>`
+
+meaning to access my a post it would have URL like:
+
+`http://www.softinio.com/post/<slug>`
+
+I could have kept it the same so that the URL to my existing content moving from Pelican to Hugo would not change, but I prefered to move forward with it this way. This is a personal choice of course.
+
+If you have a look at my `config.toml` file you will see under the `permalinks` section how I have defined my permalinks.
+
+For more details on permalinks have a look at the [Hugo documentation on permalinks](http://gohugo.io/extras/permalinks/).
+
+## GitHub
+
+By this stage I had migrated all my content to hugo and had setup my site. All tested locally. So to get ready for deployment I [created a new GitHub repo](https://help.github.com/articles/create-a-repo/) for it and pushed my code to it:
+
+To add github repo I created as my remote:
+
+```bash
+git remote add origin git@github.com:softinio/softinio.com.git
+```
+
+Commit All My work:
+
+```bash
+git commit -am "Initital version of my site"`
+```
+
+Merge the remote with my local:
+
+```bash
+git pull origin master
+```
+
+Pushed my code to GitHub:
+
+```bash
+git push origin master
+```
+
+## Creating your Amazon AWS S3 bucket
+
+I already had an account with [Amazon AWS](http://aws.amazon.com/) so I signed in and created a S3 bucket:
+
+- The bucket I named `www.softinio.com` and set it up for static website hosting by following this [Amazon Document](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/HowDoIWebsiteConfiguration.html)
+
+When I created the `www.softinio.com` bucket I also clicked `properties` and selected the `permissions` section. Here I edited the bucket policy and added:
+
+```json
+{
+    "Version": "2012-10-17",
+    "Statement": [
+        {
+            "Sid": "AddPerm",
+            "Effect": "Allow",
+            "Principal": "*",
+            "Action": "s3:GetObject",
+            "Resource": "arn:aws:s3:::<domain/bucket name>/*"
+        }
+    ]
+}
+```
+
+Of course replace `<domain/bucket name>` with your actual bucket name which for me would be `www.softinio.com`.
+
+## Moving my domains DNS management to Amazon AWS Route 53
+
+I then moved my domain's DNS management to [Amazon AWS Route 53 service](https://aws.amazon.com/route53/) for convenience.
+
+I followed the steps in this [Amazon document](http://docs.aws.amazon.com/Route53/latest/DeveloperGuide/creating-migrating.html) to move my domain's DNS management.
+
+## Creating a User on Amazon AWS to use for deployment
+
+We need to create a user on Amazon AWS to use for deployments to the S3 bucket we created. To do this log into your Amazon AWS console and select `Identity & Access Management`, then select `Users` and then select `Create New Users`.
+
+Give the new user a name and make note of the access keys for this user that gets generated for you.
+
+You will need to create a policy and attach to this user. Here is a sample policy you can use:
+
+```json
+{
+    "Version": "2012-10-17",
+    "Statement": [
+        {
+            "Action": "s3:*",
+            "Effect": "Allow",
+            "Resource": [
+                "arn:aws:s3:::<domain/bucket name>",
+                "arn:aws:s3:::<domain/bucket name>/*"
+            ]
+        }
+    ]
+}
+```
+
+Of course replace `<domain/bucket name>` with what you actually called your Amazon S3 bucket name.
+
+
+## Automate your deployments with Wercker
+
+Head over to [Wercker website](http://wercker.com/) and click sign up and register for an account.
+
+Once you have your account, login and go to your settings and click git connections. Here click to connect to your GitHub account.
+
+## Adding your application to Wercker
+
+I followed these steps:
+
+- Click Create to start adding your application
+- Select your GitHub Repository
+- Select the repository owner
+- Configure Access (I chose: `werker will checkout the code without using an ssh key`)
+- I chose not to have my app public
+
+Once the app was created Wercker gave me the option to trigger a build. Decline it as we have not finished creating our app.
+
+## Create and add wercker.yml file
+
+In the root of my project I added a new `wercker.yml` file for my configuration of wercker:
+
+```yaml
+    box: debian
+    build:
+    steps:
+        - arjen/hugo-build:
+            version: "0.14"
+            theme: hyde-x
+            config: config.toml
+            flags: --disableSitemap=false
+    deploy:
+        steps:
+        - s3sync:
+            source_dir: public/
+            delete-removed: true
+            bucket-url: $AWS_BUCKET_URL
+            key-id: $AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID
+            key-secret: $AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY
+```
+
+## Adding environment variables for deployment
+
+Log back into wercker and go to your application settings. Select `Targets` and in there add 3 new variables to your deploy pipeline:
+
+- AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID - As provided for the user you created on Amazon AWS
+
+- AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY - As provided for the user you created on AWS
+
+- AWS_BUCKET_URL - set this to `s3://yourdomain.com` (Note: having the `s3://` in front of your domain is very important!)
+
+
+## Your first deployment
+
+You are all set now to deploy your hugo website. Commit your changes and push to the GitHub repo you created and your website will be deployed to S3 for you automatically.
+
+From now on when ever you make any changes to your site, as soon as you push to your GitHub repo , it will build and deploy your changes to Amazon S3.
+
+## Conclusion
+
+I am really enjoying using Hugo for my blog and having it deploy automatically when I push a change to GitHub. My workflow is a lot simpler now making it easier for me to write and publish my blogs.
+
+You may ask why I moved from the Python based Pelican to Hugo, well I simply wanted to try something new. I think both Pelican and Hugo are great at what they do so you can't go wrong with either.
+
+If I had to choose between them, I would choose Hugo for the more modern approach and excellent documentation.