CloudFront Adventures
Some notes from a recent CloudFront implementation.
Posts by Tag
- aws 9
- reading 7
- writing 6
- agile 5
- php lithium 3
- javascript 3
- software 3
- ruby 2
- cloudformation 2
- stackmaster 2
- ec2 2
- hiring 2
- kanban 2
- scrum 2
- linux 1
- devise 1
- rspec 1
- rails 1
- capybara 1
- vim 1
- php 1
- nodejs 1
- express 1
- mongodb 1
- heroku 1
- coffeescript 1
- linux bash 1
- rbenv 1
- ruby rake 1
- php facebook 1
- apache 1
- ruby gem 1
- jquery 1
- facebook 1
- pecl 1
- gem 1
- smalltalk 1
- oop 1
- chef 1
- tdd 1
- inspec 1
- serverless 1
- lambda 1
- habits 1
- html5 1
- canvas 1
- factfulness 1
- rds 1
- standup 1
- elasticsearch 1
- elk 1
- career 1
- goals 1
- s3 1
- glacier 1
- cloudfront 1
- personal 1
- workflow 1
- software handovers 1
- databricks 1
- bigdata 1
- jira 1
- psychological safety 1
- diversity 1
- inclusion 1
- zalando 1
- feedback 1
- sbin 1
- coin 1
- interviewing 1
- development 1
- growth 1
- bragdoc 1
aws
Using S3 Lifecycle Policies
Amazon Simple Storage Service, or S3 as we know it, is a managed service for object storage. It is used to store all sorts of data, such as images, videos, a...
Using Amazon Elasticsearch Service
Replacing a self-managed ‘ELK’ stack with ‘The Elastic Stack’, using Amazon’s Elasticsearch Service.
EC2’s new vCPU-based on-demand limits
In an effort to simplify the ec2 limit management experience, AWS recently announced that it was moving on-demand EC2 instance limits away from the existing ...
Instance size flexibility for EC2 Reserved Instances
Reserved EC2 instances (RIs) can be used to reserve instance compute capacity for a fixed term, in exchange for a sizeable discount.
CloudFormation and StackMaster (part 2)
In part one of the series, we looked at using CloudFormation to codify your AWS infrastructure. I concluded with mentioning some painpoints that you might en...
CloudFormation and StackMaster (part 1)
As part of some recent infrastructure upgrades, I’ve been spending quite some time in the land of CloudFormation. If you’re unfamiliar with CloudFormation, i...
Reserving Amazon RDS resources
Reserved RDS instances (RIs) can be used to reserve a resource for a one year or a three term in exchange for a billing discount - a sizeable discount compa...
Migrating a Jenkins job to Serverless
Describing some recent experiments in migrating small services from Jenkins to AWS Lambda.
reading
Mentorships at Zalando (x-post)
Cross-posting an interview with Silicon Republic on the benefits of mentorships.
Mental Models
I recently read The Great Mental Models Volume 1: General Thinking Concepts, and took some notes along the way.
On Writing Well - Principles
I recently read On Writing Well, by William Zinsser. In this book, the author provides seven principles that can be used to write great non-fiction. These ...
Limitless
Because we don’t know when we will die, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a ...
Exploring Diversity and Inclusion
Exploring D&I
Too Soon Old, Too Late Smart
Thirty True Things You Need To Know Now.
The Body - A Guide For Occupants
I am currently reading The Body: A Guide For Occupants by Bill Bryson. This is my first Bryson book, and although I am only about half of the way through, i...
writing
Thoughts on the Skill/Will Matrix
Why Context is King
The Goal - Notes
I recently read the graphic novel edition of The Goal - a well-regarded management novel. The story revolves around the plant manager and his team, who, with...
Reskilling in the Age of AI - Notes
The most recent issue (September - October) of Harvard Business Review contained an interesting piece on reskilling. The article discusses how the rapid acc...
The Lean Product Playbook - Notes
Some notes from a recent read of The Lean Product Playbook.
Recent Writings
Cross-posting some recent articles that I wrote for the Zalando Engineering Blog.
On Writing Well - Principles
I recently read On Writing Well, by William Zinsser. In this book, the author provides seven principles that can be used to write great non-fiction. These ...
agile
Using Kanban to Surface Problems
Background to Kanban Kanban has its origins in Japan, in a Toyota factory. It was developed in response to Toyota’s poor performance relative to their Americ...
Buffer your Sprints
My team has been successfully delivering software to our stakeholders using the Scrum framework. The fixed duration sprints and detectable/measurable velocit...
Jira Dashboards for an Agile Project
Jira dashboards are a useful way to take a quick peak into a project to get a feel for their state and health. Think of them as an at-a-glance healthcheck.
Do Just One Thing
A short post on the merits of doing just one thing at a time, extracted mostly from Jeff Sutherland’s Scrum book, and some supporting / referenced materials.
Effective Kanban standups
Some thoughts on making the most of your daily standups. These tips were extracted from Manning’s Kanban In Action which I would recommend for all teams who...
php lithium
li3_airbrake - Lithium Airbrake plugin
I recently wrote a plugin for Lithium that reports application errors to the awesome Airbrake.io service. I’ve been writing code for various Airbrake project...
Dynamically set li3 environment based on subdomain
I’ve mentioned before that our latest project in work, is built on Lithium. It aint no Rails, but its not bad for a PHP framework! ;)
Miscellaneous Lithium (li3) bits and bobs
In work, we recently started development on a new product to solve the problems with Facebook Promoted Posts.
javascript
Rediscovering JavaScript
I am currently reading Rediscovering JavaScript.
Stupidly simple jQuery plugin for Facebook login
Using Facebook to authenticate users for you application is nice for a number of reasons.
JavaScript instanceof vs typeof
I’ve been writing JavaScript for quite some time, but only recently came across instanceof, typeof on the otherhand I’ve always been aware of.
software
Buffer your Sprints
My team has been successfully delivering software to our stakeholders using the Scrum framework. The fixed duration sprints and detectable/measurable velocit...
Jira Dashboards for an Agile Project
Jira dashboards are a useful way to take a quick peak into a project to get a feel for their state and health. Think of them as an at-a-glance healthcheck.
The four states of a team
Identified by Will Larson in An Elegant Puzzle, a team can be viewed as residing within one of four states.
ruby
A ruby client for free tech books
If you’re not already using IT-Ebooks.info for sourcing ebooks, then you probably should be.
Automatically check PHP / Ruby syntax on file save
Automatically check PHP / Ruby syntax on file save
cloudformation
CloudFormation and StackMaster (part 2)
In part one of the series, we looked at using CloudFormation to codify your AWS infrastructure. I concluded with mentioning some painpoints that you might en...
CloudFormation and StackMaster (part 1)
As part of some recent infrastructure upgrades, I’ve been spending quite some time in the land of CloudFormation. If you’re unfamiliar with CloudFormation, i...
stackmaster
CloudFormation and StackMaster (part 2)
In part one of the series, we looked at using CloudFormation to codify your AWS infrastructure. I concluded with mentioning some painpoints that you might en...
CloudFormation and StackMaster (part 1)
As part of some recent infrastructure upgrades, I’ve been spending quite some time in the land of CloudFormation. If you’re unfamiliar with CloudFormation, i...
ec2
EC2’s new vCPU-based on-demand limits
In an effort to simplify the ec2 limit management experience, AWS recently announced that it was moving on-demand EC2 instance limits away from the existing ...
Instance size flexibility for EC2 Reserved Instances
Reserved EC2 instances (RIs) can be used to reserve instance compute capacity for a fixed term, in exchange for a sizeable discount.
hiring
Notes from Hiring Success
Notes from Hiring Success : How Visionary CEOs Compete for the Best Talent.
Six destructive myths about technical hiring
Following a recent discussion with a friend about hiring engineers, I recommended that they read Building Great Software Engineering Teams by Josh Tyler. The...
kanban
Using Kanban to Surface Problems
Background to Kanban Kanban has its origins in Japan, in a Toyota factory. It was developed in response to Toyota’s poor performance relative to their Americ...
Effective Kanban standups
Some thoughts on making the most of your daily standups. These tips were extracted from Manning’s Kanban In Action which I would recommend for all teams who...
scrum
Buffer your Sprints
My team has been successfully delivering software to our stakeholders using the Scrum framework. The fixed duration sprints and detectable/measurable velocit...
Jira Dashboards for an Agile Project
Jira dashboards are a useful way to take a quick peak into a project to get a feel for their state and health. Think of them as an at-a-glance healthcheck.
linux
Building your new CentOS box
I tend to use Dediserve for my VPS solutions, and anytime I create a new box with them, I generally build it the same way. Most of the steps I’ve picked up a...
devise
Integration testing Devise with RSpec and Capybara
I use Rails quite a bit for development and recently noticed that my unit tests were quite indepth but that my integration tests were lacking. So I recently...
rspec
Integration testing Devise with RSpec and Capybara
I use Rails quite a bit for development and recently noticed that my unit tests were quite indepth but that my integration tests were lacking. So I recently...
rails
Integration testing Devise with RSpec and Capybara
I use Rails quite a bit for development and recently noticed that my unit tests were quite indepth but that my integration tests were lacking. So I recently...
capybara
Integration testing Devise with RSpec and Capybara
I use Rails quite a bit for development and recently noticed that my unit tests were quite indepth but that my integration tests were lacking. So I recently...
vim
Some VIm tips for navigation
VIm is my primary editor,.. actually, scratch that, my only editor. I spend most of my awake time in terminals writing code and over the years I’ve found VIm...
php
Automatically check PHP / Ruby syntax on file save
Automatically check PHP / Ruby syntax on file save
nodejs
Using Node.JS, Express & MongoDB on Heroku
I’ve been playing with Node.JS and Express as of late, and earlier today I wanted to put a simple application that used MondogDB up on Heroku.
express
Using Node.JS, Express & MongoDB on Heroku
I’ve been playing with Node.JS and Express as of late, and earlier today I wanted to put a simple application that used MondogDB up on Heroku.
mongodb
Using Node.JS, Express & MongoDB on Heroku
I’ve been playing with Node.JS and Express as of late, and earlier today I wanted to put a simple application that used MondogDB up on Heroku.
heroku
Using Node.JS, Express & MongoDB on Heroku
I’ve been playing with Node.JS and Express as of late, and earlier today I wanted to put a simple application that used MondogDB up on Heroku.
coffeescript
First steps with CoffeeScript
I’ve been intending to use CoffeeScript for ages now. Rails adopting it was the kick up the arse I needed to go and learn it. I got a copy of CoffeeScript as...
linux bash
Killing multiple process instances from the terminal
I sometimes have multiple instances of a process running, typically, worker scripts that are dealing with clearing out a backlog. From time to time, I’ll nee...
rbenv
Installing rbenv on OSX / ZSH
I recently switched from using rvm to using rbenv for managing different ruby versions. The install is relatively straightforward, but a few caveats when usi...
ruby rake
Supply arguments to a rake task
Whilst working on a recent project, I wanted to create a rake task that would send a curl request to a particular url. It was a pain to keep changing the re...
php facebook
Send batch requests to Graph API using Facebook’s PHP client
The PHP SDK provided by Facebook is quite good, though it lacks the ability to send batched requests. The reason for sending batched requests is that it allo...
apache
Apache redirect to SSL
This is something I can never remember, and keep having to Google.
ruby gem
Ruby client for the Perfect Audience API
I recently wrote a Ruby gem called Perfecta, that wraps the Perfect Audience reporting API.
jquery
Stupidly simple jQuery plugin for Facebook login
Using Facebook to authenticate users for you application is nice for a number of reasons.
Stupidly simple jQuery plugin for Facebook login
Using Facebook to authenticate users for you application is nice for a number of reasons.
pecl
Downgrading a PECL extension
I recently upgraded the Mongo PECL extension that a project depended upon, only to get hit with a load of Segfaults on OSX. I had used the pecl upgrade mongo...
gem
A ruby client for free tech books
If you’re not already using IT-Ebooks.info for sourcing ebooks, then you probably should be.
smalltalk
Smalltalk Best Practice Patterns
I was recently asked by a friend about which programming books I’ve found most useful over the years. I’ve read a lot of software development books but one o...
oop
Smalltalk Best Practice Patterns
I was recently asked by a friend about which programming books I’ve found most useful over the years. I’ve read a lot of software development books but one o...
chef
Test-driven provisioning with Chef
Chef is a killer tool for automating and testing your software stack. In this post I’d like to demonstrate our method of TDD’ing our infrastructure.
tdd
Test-driven provisioning with Chef
Chef is a killer tool for automating and testing your software stack. In this post I’d like to demonstrate our method of TDD’ing our infrastructure.
inspec
Test-driven provisioning with Chef
Chef is a killer tool for automating and testing your software stack. In this post I’d like to demonstrate our method of TDD’ing our infrastructure.
serverless
Migrating a Jenkins job to Serverless
Describing some recent experiments in migrating small services from Jenkins to AWS Lambda.
lambda
Migrating a Jenkins job to Serverless
Describing some recent experiments in migrating small services from Jenkins to AWS Lambda.
habits
Atomic Habits
Some notes and observations from Atomic Habits, by James Clear.
html5
Tainted canvases may not be exported
How to export a tainted HTML5 canvas to Base64.
canvas
Tainted canvases may not be exported
How to export a tainted HTML5 canvas to Base64.
factfulness
Factfulness
Some notes from Factfulness (Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About The World - And Why Things Are Better Than You Think).
rds
Reserving Amazon RDS resources
Reserved RDS instances (RIs) can be used to reserve a resource for a one year or a three term in exchange for a billing discount - a sizeable discount compa...
standup
Effective Kanban standups
Some thoughts on making the most of your daily standups. These tips were extracted from Manning’s Kanban In Action which I would recommend for all teams who...
elasticsearch
Using Amazon Elasticsearch Service
Replacing a self-managed ‘ELK’ stack with ‘The Elastic Stack’, using Amazon’s Elasticsearch Service.
elk
Using Amazon Elasticsearch Service
Replacing a self-managed ‘ELK’ stack with ‘The Elastic Stack’, using Amazon’s Elasticsearch Service.
career
Goal-setting
End of year. Goal-setting season is upon us. A lot of people see this as little more than a box-ticking exercise, but don’t fall into this trap. Goal-setting...
goals
Goal-setting
End of year. Goal-setting season is upon us. A lot of people see this as little more than a box-ticking exercise, but don’t fall into this trap. Goal-setting...
s3
Using S3 Lifecycle Policies
Amazon Simple Storage Service, or S3 as we know it, is a managed service for object storage. It is used to store all sorts of data, such as images, videos, a...
glacier
Using S3 Lifecycle Policies
Amazon Simple Storage Service, or S3 as we know it, is a managed service for object storage. It is used to store all sorts of data, such as images, videos, a...
cloudfront
CloudFront Adventures
Some notes from a recent CloudFront implementation.
personal
A Look Back Over 2019
A look back at the last twelve months.
workflow
Do Just One Thing
A short post on the merits of doing just one thing at a time, extracted mostly from Jeff Sutherland’s Scrum book, and some supporting / referenced materials.
software handovers
Successful Handovers
Notes on taking over a software project from an existing team.
databricks
Databricks - An Introduction
I recently started learning about Databricks, a unified data analytics platform. The platform is large and this is a relatively new domain to me, so these ar...
bigdata
Databricks - An Introduction
I recently started learning about Databricks, a unified data analytics platform. The platform is large and this is a relatively new domain to me, so these ar...
jira
Jira Dashboards for an Agile Project
Jira dashboards are a useful way to take a quick peak into a project to get a feel for their state and health. Think of them as an at-a-glance healthcheck.
psychological safety
Psychological Safety
Notes and learnings from the fearless organization, and some surrounding resources.
diversity
Exploring Diversity and Inclusion
Exploring D&I
inclusion
Exploring Diversity and Inclusion
Exploring D&I
zalando
Reflecting on one year with Zalando
Today, February 17th, marks my one year anniversary with Zalando, and aptly, is a nice time to reflect on that year.
feedback
Feedback Templates - SBIN vs COIN
Some notes on two different feedback templates, and my 2c on when to opt for one over the other. Almost identical, they differ only on how the stage is opene...
sbin
Feedback Templates - SBIN vs COIN
Some notes on two different feedback templates, and my 2c on when to opt for one over the other. Almost identical, they differ only on how the stage is opene...
coin
Feedback Templates - SBIN vs COIN
Some notes on two different feedback templates, and my 2c on when to opt for one over the other. Almost identical, they differ only on how the stage is opene...
interviewing
Landing your first Software Engineering Role
Software Engineering is an incredibly rewarding and satisfying career choice. On a daily basis, you get to flex your creative muscles to solve complex probl...
development
Keeping a Bragdoc
At the beginning of each year, I spend a considerable amount of time speaking and advising colleagues and peers on the topic of goals and ambitions. Regardl...
growth
Keeping a Bragdoc
At the beginning of each year, I spend a considerable amount of time speaking and advising colleagues and peers on the topic of goals and ambitions. Regardl...
bragdoc
Keeping a Bragdoc
At the beginning of each year, I spend a considerable amount of time speaking and advising colleagues and peers on the topic of goals and ambitions. Regardl...