Mike's Blog

The Value of Time and Struggle

Michael Park — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I have many conflicting thoughts that I -- as a data engineer, a consultant, a member of society, a friend to some, and husband to one -- am going to try to articulate throughout the course of this post. I will do my best to organise my thoughts throughout this piece in way that at least helps me formalise how I am currently feeling about my long-term future in data and software engineering over the last two years of using AI to various degrees.

Starship JJ Theme

Michael Park — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

There are a few nice modules for JJ that exist currently for starship.rs but none of them fit what I was after...

Convenient auto-command for vim.pack.update

Michael Park — Mon, 04 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Neovim 0.12's new built-in package management is a breath of fresh air, but the default confirmation buffer is a bit bare-bones when it comes to quick interactions. If you're like me and want to just hit a key to sync everything up instead of using the code action ca and selecting update on each package...

Finding Nerd Fonts in Neovim

Michael Park — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I have been writing quite a few presentations in presenterm and was repeatedly going over to the nerd font website to search for the icon that I wanted to pick copying it, then pasting it in neovim. Surely... there is a better way.

Two useful aliases for use with JJ

Michael Park — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Everyone will have the jj tug alias defined in their list of aliases in their jj config. I would like to share two that I think are quite nifty and useful!

Updating Treesitter's Config to use Main

Michael Park — Mon, 15 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

If you woke up to the news that treesitter has set their default branch to main from the now frozen master then you may wish to know how to now configure your plugins that depend on it in neovim. Here's how I did it in my local dotfiles.

age.nvim

Michael Park — Sun, 26 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

🔗GitHub

A simply utility for loading encrypted secrets from an age encrypted file.

This utility can be required by other plugins as a dependency to load a secret from your dotfiles to pass to a plugin.

For example, the llm.nvim plugin requires an API key. For those people who keep their dotfiles public but want to load an API key for its setup.

I take no responsibility for leaked passwords or API keys. It is on you to decide what age is, this approach, and making sure to not commit your identity keys. Inspired by pass and passage

🔗Requirements

🔗Non-Neovim Instructions

Generate a private key not in directory tracked by git.

mkdir ~/.age
cd ~/.age
age-keygen -o identity.txt

The contents of this identity.txt file will look like this (Taken from the tests directory in this project for example).

# created: 2023-10-14T17:25:45+01:00
# public key: age1kk84zfvr4whsfdmrg2hk8pf7l3v705a8x9k5khuh0lmtrnuaz4gqnwty3q
AGE-SECRET-KEY-1USUPGW9GDQAQEHM8X3JKQSJMN7YY5T26PXWFHWMRR4Y9TDAHMA5SJDRUUJ

Encrypt your secret.

age_public_key='age1kk84zfvr4whsfdmrg2hk8pf7l3v705a8x9k5khuh0lmtrnuaz4gqnwty3q'
echo 'MY_SUPER_COOL_API_KEY' | age -e -r "$age_public_key" -o ~/.dotfiles/api_key.age

🔗Neovim Instructions

🔗Package manager

🔗Using lazy.nvim

This example is using the excellent ChatGPT.nvim.

local identity = vim.fn.expand('$HOME/.age/identity.txt')
local secret = vim.fn.expand('$HOME/.dotfiles/chatgpt.age')

require("lazy").setup({
    "jackMort/ChatGPT.nvim",
    event = "VeryLazy",
    dependencies = {
        ...
        "KingMichaelPark/age.nvim" -- Add age dependency
    }
    config = function()
        vim.env.OPENAI_API_KEY = require('age').get(secret, identity) -- Get secret
        require("chatgpt").setup()
    end,
}
})

🔗Usage

At the moment there are 4 options for decryption, I have added SOPs decrypt as an option for json only as there is a built-in json decoder in neovim.

local age = require('age')

age.get(
    "super-secret.txt.age", -- The file to decrypt
    "identity.txt" -- Your private age key
)

age.list(
    "super-secrets-multiline.txt.age", -- The file to decrypt
    "identity.txt" -- Your private age key
)

-- Returns a table
age.from_json(
    "super-secrets.json.age", -- The file to decrypt
    "identity.txt" -- Your private age key
)

-- Returns a table
age.from_sops("tests/sops_api_keys.json")
-- SOPs uses a special path so you don't need to pass your identity

🔗Running Tests

To run tests:

Open neovim
Have plenary.nvim installed
Run :PlenaryBustedDirectory tests/

🔗Authors

@KingMichaelPark

🔗Contributing

Contributions are always welcome!

Wildcard Routing with Cloudflare Email Forwarding

Michael Park — Tue, 12 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

If you have your own domain name but are cheap like me and don't want to pay for a third party service you can use Cloudflare to route your emails to your gmail address. (And after reading this quick post, can forward even plus suffixed email addresses to your gmail account.

Speed up Python Github Actions

Michael Park — Tue, 15 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

If you want to speed up your CI builds you can use this setup on your GitHub actions. Doing this from the previous method cut my build times from 2 minutes to 1 minute.

Treesitter Highlights for Jenkinsfile

Michael Park — Wed, 31 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Ever wanted syntax in neovim for Jenkinsfiles? Let's create an autocommand to do just that!

The Flaw in Taking Photos to Capture Memories (and how to fix it)

Michael Park — Sun, 28 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Years ago, I was looking through old photo collections of my youth. Despite the happiness on my face, the people smiling around me, there something missing, my father.

Python Logging

Michael Park — Wed, 24 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Just a very quick post/memo to myself about an awesome way to configure logging in python based on an excellent Github repo I stumbled across via a YouTube video.

2023 - A Tech Year in Review

Michael Park — Sun, 10 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

2023 gave me the ability to experience a lot of different tools, languages, and technologies, many did not make the cut long-term but I would like to put together a list of the core tooling that I use day to day with an example or two along the way.

SQLAlchemy, OnUpdate & Datetime UTCNOW deprecation in 3.12

Michael Park — Mon, 20 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

This is a quick post about migrating your utcnow() to now(tz=UTC) in SQLAlchemy for your onupdate function argument to your SQL Models.

Connecting to Internal VPC Through Bastion in One Hop

Michael Park — Thu, 19 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

If you've ever wanted to load up your local database IDE to view a database that sits inside an internal VPC. You may be a bit puzzled on how to do it considering most tools like DBeaver, DataGrip, TablePlus allow you to connect via SSH, but that SSH connection is always to a bastion instance. How does one connect directly?

Big Uploads and Checksum Validation

Michael Park — Wed, 04 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Ever wanted to upload big files without storing them in memory as they are being written with FastAPI?

Git Signing and Authentication with SSH

Michael Park — Wed, 04 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

This is a quick guide to set up git with SSH ed25519 keys not only for authenticating with GitHub or GitLab but also for signing commits without the need to install GPG/PGP which has some serious criticisms / flaws that has led me to move into a world without it. The new world isn't as straightforward as the old so I thought I'd just throw together a quick guide to help you out.

Mocking the Post Method on an Async HTTPX Post Request

Michael Park — Wed, 02 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

A quick snippet for mocking HTTP requests with an the async httpx context manager.

async with httpx.AsyncClient() as client:
    signup_response = await client.post(
        f"https://{AUTH0_DOMAIN}/api/v2/users",
        data=signup_request_body,
        headers=signup_request_headers,
        timeout=30,
    )

Tmux in Linux and Mac With Wezterm

Michael Park — Fri, 10 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000

After struggling to get tmux to run seamlessly between Mac (on ARM i.e. M1/M2) and linux due to the fact that brew installs packages to /opt/homebrew/bin/ and it isn't on the path before the shell loads, I have finally worked out how to get tmux to launch/attach to existing sessions when launching a new terminal both in linux and on MacOS.

Testing in the Terminal

Michael Park — Thu, 16 Feb 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Find yourself running a pytest command repeatedly trying to work out what a problem is and getting sick of clicking back on the terminal window where the output is and pressing arrow up to re-run the test? Or even running tests in an IDE and sick of re-running the test time after time with your mouse?

Gaming on Xbox with OpenWRT

Michael Park — Tue, 13 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

If you are like me and decided to switch their router firmware to the much praised OpenWRT you may - like me - found the lag in FPS games pretty unbreable after switching the firmware.

The Pursuit

Michael Park — Sat, 28 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000

The pursuit of excellence can sometimes be overwhelming. Whether it be in sports, your career, games.

Looking Forward to 2022; The Ease of Being a Cynic

Michael Park — Thu, 23 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000

My goals for 2022 are nothing out of the ordinary; apart from having some of them be to actually travel somewhere of relatively far distance in a hopefully more open world. The main goal that should hopefully help drive the rest is optimism

The Little Things

Michael Park — Sun, 28 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0000

The dozens of predictions that economists have been making over the last two years centers around this idea that once everything returns to a certain level of normal - probably better to use safe instead of normal but I'm sure we all agree normal means something different than it used to - consumers are going to start splurging on all the money they have been saving up. Personally, even if this turns out to be the case eventually, I think this saga of our lives really has given us enjoyment in the little things.