Tools on Bill Glover

File transfer made easy

hello@bill.dev (Bill) — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 15:59:46 +0100

My wife recorded several hours of audio during the Bologna Book Fair this week. We’d agreed that she’d send me the audio each evening and I’d run it through local transcription to give her an editable text version of the conversations.

When she tried to send me the files, she was presented with the following error.

attachment too long

2020 Delightful Tech

hello@bill.dev (Bill) — Wed, 30 Dec 2020 21:15:00 +0000

I don’t often make recommendations for apps or services. It’s rare that technology fills me with delight to such an extend that I have the urge to recommend it to others. I’m all too aware that your needs may be different from mine.

For example, I love my 2015 MacBook but I’ve never been able to recommend it to anyone. It’s slow, has one port, and was expensive. It has been an absolute delight for me and remains the best laptop I’ve ever owned. But that doesn’t make it right for you. So much so, that Apple no longer offers it for sale.

Remote Pairing Made Easy

hello@bill.dev (Bill) — Wed, 09 Dec 2020 15:37:00 +0000

We have many options for remote pairing on code. Each brings different trade-offs to the challenge of remote productivity.

Screen Sharing (e.g. Zoom, Whereby, etc.)
Shared IDE (e.g. VSCode Live Share)
Dedicated collaborative coding tools (e.g. GitDuck)
The good old fashioned terminal

I’m not going to go into which of these is the best pairing option, each have their merits. COMBINE.. But the last of these, the terminal, is often overlooked. If considered, the perceived set-up costs often push us towards an alternative solution.

My Toolbox: Octant

hello@bill.dev (Bill) — Mon, 12 Oct 2020 10:00:00 +0000

We are constantly presented with new tools all the time; scripts, themes, or even code editors. We try them, we forget about them, and before you know it a brew update take minutes rather than seconds to run. The few tools that do tend to stick around are those that solve a real need. Octant is one such tool. It’s not just the latest addition to my toolbox, it’s one that I’m turning to with increasing regularity.

How I Manage Kubernetes Config

hello@bill.dev (Bill) — Fri, 12 Jun 2020 06:00:00 +0000

If you work with Kubernetes, you’ll be aware of the config file that defines contexts. This config is what kubectl uses to gain access to a cluster. I work with a large number of ephemeral clusters and have found that this config is difficult to manage. This post shows how I’ve switched to using individual config files for each cluster.

Keep Your Tech Discussions on Track with Fish Bones

hello@bill.dev (Bill) — Thu, 21 May 2020 21:20:35 +0000

As a child, I had a nasty experience involving pizza, anchovies and a small fishbone. I’ve never touched anchovies since and it has taken me a long time to get used to the idea of eating fish at all. But that’s not what I’m here to write about. I’m here to share a different experience of fish bones.

Recently I was preparing for a conversation with a customer where they’d asked to discuss a broad range of technologies. With these discussions, I’ve found that it is easy to get sucked into technical detail and lose sight of the main agenda. This is particularly true if the discussion involves a technical demo. I enjoy these types of discussion, but have been looking for ways to help keep things on track.

Dive Through the Layers

hello@bill.dev (Bill) — Fri, 28 Feb 2020 06:16:35 +0000

Dive Through the Layers

I’ve been working with a container image for a Django application and was surprised to find that an image for a simple application was 1.2 GB. This was particularly jarring as, coming from the world of Go, I’m used to images that come in at under 20 MB.

It’s not the size of the container image that’s the problem. Layer caching and re-use means that you are rarely transferring the full image around and that storage on disk is usually less than the sum of all your images. The worry I have with an image that is 1.2 GB is that everything that makes up that image needs to be maintained, patched, watched for security vulnerabilities, etc. 1.2 GB is a lot of software.

WireGuard - the most stable VPN yet

hello@bill.dev (Bill) — Sun, 05 Jan 2020 09:06:51 +0000

WireGuard - The Best VPN Yet

There are two reasons I regularly use a VPN connection on my portable devices; to give myself some privacy when using untrusted networks and to get around network filtering or censorship when traveling abroad. Over the years I’ve switched between running my own VPN endpoint and paying for a subscription with one of the popular providers. I’ve recently settled on a new favourite, WireGuard. I’ve found it to be fast, stable, and unusually tolerant of an unstable network. In this post I’ll take you through how to get set-up with your very own WireGuard VPN.