I’ve been avoiding Docker for a very long time. I started as a sysadmin setting up servers running FreeBSD and early versions of Debian on bare-bone servers. As soon as “cloud” came into the market, I switched to AWS and GCE and have used them since then. EC2 was my always goto choice to deploy something on the internet quickly. But Docker — for some reason, I was avoiding it until this two years ago, when I started using it. Without too much trust.

But today, history is not about my love & hate relationship with Docker, but about deploying the GO application and VIPS library. A couple of problems appeared during the process, and it’s worth mentioning them for future generations because I could find much help around my issues.

Dealing with DNS changes can be annoying and frustrating. Changes are not visible straight away, you have to wait to see them. Thet are not even. Here you can find links to clear cached records in popular public DNS servers:

Flushing DNS cache

• Flush Google Public DNS Cache
• Purge Cloudflare Public DNS Cache

Checking results

You can check results here:

• IntoDNS
• Refresh OpenDNS Cache

DNSSEC Tools

• DNSViz. A DNS Visualization Tool
• DNS Check
• DNSSEC Analyzer
• SIDN DNSSEC Test

I built a simple worker to do some magic with images by using Go & VIPS . I chose VIPS because it is blazing fast compared to other Go image processing libraries. So this is the story about what went wrong.

Because my DEV setup is Apple MacBook Pro with M1 Apple Silicon, it’s always tricky to compile something to the proper architecture. Installing VIPS on my machine, it’s pretty straightforward:

brew install vips

You can find some online APIs and use the free tier to test them, but you can make them your own. So without any further instructions, here is a recipe.

Recently one of my clients contacted me asking if I could make a change. The task was to shrink huge margins on PDF delivery slips. The mission wasn’t easy because the settings were hidden in the files. You can change font size and amend or remove elements from the printout by modifying templates. Unfortunately, you can’t decrease the margin on PDF printouts.