Blue-green deployments on a Hetzner VM: A quick guide on releasing your apps with optimized Docker builds, nginx proxy and fast pipelines with Github Actions

During the recent attempts to find a cheaper alternative to big cloud players such as AWS or Azure, I found several options to deploy somewhat simple apps to provisioned VMs and have some sort of Load Balancing, HTTPS and other essentials things. Of course, this varies by your use case, and here I will be focusing on the “backend” part of your application that in most cases could be a single service, or a docker container running it.

Setting up an affordable, multi-model AI chatbot interface for daily workflows

A second blog post about AI Chatbots. I did not expect this, but anyway, you probably encountered a complex problem that your favorite AI chat can’t solve. Whether it be Gemini, ChatGPT or anything else, you probably thought about entering the same query into another chat, to see if its response is somewhat better. Not to mention, some of the AI models require monthly subscriptions, making this somewhat expensive. In this blog post, I am going to provide my current setup for querying multiple models, with a minimal but satisfactory UI at a very good price.

Software engineers must use AI to stay relevant

You might be familiar with the “Technology Camel” model proposed by Elizabeth Ghaffari and Barbara McNurlin, a modification of the traditional Technology Adoption Life Cycle (TALC) which visualizes the adoption of new technologies as a two-humped camel graph.1 While this image does not explain every wrong attitude towards AI chatbots, it serves as an ever-lasting truth to basically any new technology. There will simply always by a percentage of people who are not willing to dive into the all stuff new tech brings.