Jacob Millward

I’m a developer in the north of England, with a habit of breaking warranties.

You can find write ups of my fumblings amazing successes below. Alternatively check out my work on GitHub.

Want to hire me? Get in touch.

Installing Istio With a Helmfile

Intro Istio is an open-source service-mesh platform for kubernetes. A service mesh is a tool for managing communication between services in a microservices architecture. It’s particularly useful because it provides security and configuration features, such as mutual TLS (mTLS) and TLS termination via Envoy sidecar proxies. In this tutorial, we’ll use Helmfile to declaratively manage Istio installation on your Kubernetes cluster. Istio helpfully provides some helm charts, but there are some additional settings to enable to ensure that helmfile installation goes smoothly....

Bare-bones boilerplate for React and webpack projects

This is old news, and both the web, world and myself have advanced since this was written. Just use create-react-app instead tldr; Here it is. In my endeavours to get to grips with front-end JS development, I did some research and decided to launch into learning React by Facebook. This in turn introduced me to the huge complicated mess that is front-end tooling. A lot of React tutorials and documentation requires that you use webpack, so that’s my module loader chosen for me....

ColdFlame - A C# Game Engine

It’s been a few months since I last posted, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t been working on anything! In my last post I mentioned that I was working on a game engine. As of now, it’s at a stage where the basic framework is mostly feature-complete! Tada! ColdFlame is an entity-component driven game engine meant to make adding new features and extending your game a breeze. A single scene is populated by entities, which are just an ID associated with a list of components....

Arch Linux derivatives

Arch Linux is by far my favourite distro not least because its rolling-release update system means I’m always running the latest and greatest. However, setting up a graphical desktop system and installing some base apps is boring and tedious work. So whilst installing it onto my Macbook Air (Mid 2013, “6,2”) I decided to forgo that busywork and check out the distros that have done that for me. I’ll be showing you two distros that I checked out, Manjaro and Antergos....

June 5, 2015 4 min

My first Ludum Dare experience

After years of watching Ludum Dare from the sidelines, I decided to enter #32 and here’s what I’ve learnt so hopefully you don’t make the same mistakes. You can view my entry here. After learning the theme at 2am on Saturday, I took a nap until 9am so I could be refreshed and creative when I woke up. I started working by 10am. Hence my first mistake: 1. Think about your Game Idea I had a vague idea in my head, something about plants attacking a city....

Git 2.3 Push to Deploy

Git 2.3 (Release Notes) was released today, bringing some exciting new changes. More importantly, it means an easier way to keep your server updated. I previously wrote about a way to automagically update your site with changes to a repository. Now as long as your site doesn’t require a build step you can update your site by pushing directly to your webserver. You can enable this on your server with the following command....

Updating a site using Github Webhooks

UPDATE: You might find this newer post more helpful. A while ago I was making a small site with Jekyll, and my workflow looked something like this: Make changes locally Commit changes and push them to a Github repository SSH into the server and pull the changes Use Jekyll to build the new version of the site. This got pretty old pretty fast so I decided to do something about it....

Hacking the iKettle

Over Christmas I was lucky enough to receive the iKettle/WifiKettle. When you set it up it creates its own wifi network that you have to connect to, before you can use the mobile app to connect it to your home network (unfortunately 2.4GHz only). A bit clunky but hey it works. Me being the geek I am the first thing I wanted to know was if I could make my own apps for it....