On my previous post What does the Build Team Do, I covered various topics about builds and devOps. Today, I want to go more in depth on what goes on when you press the run button which I briefly brushed over in the previous post. This does get quite technical but don’t fret. I have stopped myself from writing and reading up in depth about the topic to avoid going through the rabbit hole.

Although still under progress, I have been dabbling with reveal.js, an HTML presentation framework. It’s absolutely beautiful and has markdown and tex support which is excellent. I wanted to create a presentation that is more functional to showcase computer science concepts and found OpenOffice Impress to be unsuitable. After viewing the demo for reveal.js, I was immediately sold. It contains so many features that I need and has a low learning curve for someone who has sufficient HTML experience.

In my undergraduate in Computer Science, I got the opportunity to work at IBM as a member of the Build Infrastructure Team. I had absolutely no clue what the Build Infrastructure Team is or does. Though I am no expert and I still have a difficult time explaining what I do to friends and family, I’ll try to tackle the subject to the best of my ability. This post is a precursor to an education session titled An Overview of DevOps and Builds I plan to give to new interns of the Build Infrastructure Team at IBM this May. I am hoping my actions of writing a blog will prepare me for my presentation. (On a side note, this is a good sequel to my previous blog about Software Ports)

Software porting is the process of adapting a program to be able to execute in another computing environment that differs from the originally intended computing environment.

I was recently watching a video by Live Overflow helping a person troubleshoot a format string exploit through Twitter, and saw something I was very curious about. In the video, the Yotuber poses a question to the person if they could describe how %2$s prints a string. I have never seen this syntax before. What does the dollar sign ($) serve in the format string? This got me curious so I went searching on the internet and the man pages to find out.

Reminiscing another problem I encounter during my internship at IBM, I encountered an issue with some internal tools during a server migration.