I don’t typically subscribe to books about decision-making or “life hacking” or even time management. I just finished my second read of Essentialism by Greg McKeown. I read through it the first time, and I was skeptical. After my second read, I can say I am a believer. I can’t recommend this book enough. I have had trouble divorcing myself from work for a while. I would always be the guy saying; ... Read more

To go along with a talk I am doing this week, I created a demo project to reinforce the idea behind ephemeral architecture and infrastructure as code. We create two S3 buckets for the purpose of intake and another to serve out a static site we will be generating using ECS. The first bucket is a place to drop photos which then triggers a lambda function, we will call this photo_bucket. ... Read more

After watching @kelseyhightower’s speech at Strangeloop 2015. I was really impressed at the ease of instruction and demonstration he showed. I had not played with Kubernetes aside from using the kube-up.sh script in the github repo with the EC2 provider. He starts off the talk by saying: > How would you design your infrastructure if you could never login? I have worked with clients and have said these exact words. It immediately grabbed my attention. ... Read more

This was a post I had stashed away a while ago by Vidar Hokstad. He goes into some of the uses he has been seeing/using docker for. I have used some of these and I am sure there are even more development patterns out there now. The one I am most interested in is the ‘installer’ container as he calls it. There are so many installers that come in the form of… ... Read more

So I have been on a bit of a kick with Docker. I have been in Boston talking about it, giving webinars on it, and using it just about everywhere in every which way I can. One of the first things I realized is that I hate installing dependencies on all of my things. Installing ruby, git, gcc, and not to mention all the gems that I need to run. ... Read more

Well it is that time again. AWS re:Invent is right around the corner and I will once again be making the trek to beautiful Las Vegas. I am looking forward to seeing some familiar faces and even more excited to see what new service offerings will be unveiled. Plenty of people from 2ndWatch will be there @ booth # 626 so be sure to swing on by and chat for a bit. ... Read more

Hey Andre, Look at this! Over the past 5 months I have been working on a team of about five people on a shared workstation. Originally I had my reservations about other people working on the same machine as everyone else, but was quickly swaying to use it myself. Rather than set everyone up on their windows laptops (which I still think is a huge barrier for entry) our workstation was originally set up to help other people start coding, developing, and learning ruby. ... Read more

Starting this week I am going to start sharing an assortment of links weekly that I have found interesting through the course of my week. These may not be necessarily be new. Also, I won’t be shouting out to anyone in particular but if you or your material end up on this list, thanks in advance! Twitter CLI: t a command line twitter app which is pretty awesome. National Vulnerability Database this has been around for a while and might be old hat for most of you out there, however people newer to system administration will find a wealth of information here, relating to the security of their infrastructure. ... Read more

So we are about half-way through day 1 of Amazon’s re:Invent and let me be the first to say, so far everything has been great. Registration was amazingly fast, all of the staff have been incredibly polite, and immediately after getting through registration I got my first piece of swag! So it is not all sunshine and rainbows, there is some work to be done. Today I started off with a hands-on lab getting my hands into setting up security profiles with the IAM credential system and then configurring instances of S3, EC2, and EBS. ... Read more

I was poking around the web and found an interesting website that show cases some of the key features of many different programming languages. Presenting… drumroll… learn x in y minutes.