I'm a huge fan of GitHub actions and organization level secrets, but you can't see what the current secret is w/i GitHub (w/o deploying a container somewhere with it exported as an ENV var). I tried to keep a copy in my former secret management tool clipperz.is/app but drift is real. It was always too … Continue reading Managing Github Secrets with Vault
Secure GitHub Deployments to Your Home
I'm a cheap bastard when it comes to online services. All my repositories have been publicly hosted on GitHub well before Microsoft swooped in and offered unlimited private repos. Since around 2016, this had been my build/deploy pipeline: You might ask how could that ssh key be comprised. Well, back in the day, CircleCI would … Continue reading Secure GitHub Deployments to Your Home
Three things you need to stop doing when becoming an engineering manager
You are a great software engineer with years of experience under your belt. You've seen too many technologies come and go to easily fall for the next hyped framework. You choose the tools which get the job done and have a good chance to keep working for the years to come. Despite growing experience, your … Continue reading Three things you need to stop doing when becoming an engineering manager
Write your own Slack chatbot in Golang
Chatbots are all the rage nowadays so I'll show you how to plug one into your own Slack channel. It's easy, fun and, best of all, completely free! I. Preparation Of course, you'll need a Slack team which I'll refer to as yourteam.slack.com throughout this post. The free plan includes up to 10 apps or … Continue reading Write your own Slack chatbot in Golang
Technical Debt
You have to make that release date. You need more time to get the structure of your modules right, but you don't have it. Hitting the release date is more important than cleaning your code, so you defer the cleanup to make the deadline. You agree to take on technical debt which you'll have to … Continue reading Technical Debt
Knife EC2: Manage Amazon EC2 Instances With Chef
Chef enables you to automate your infrastructure. It provides a command line tool called knife to help you manage your configurations. Using the knife EC2 plugin you can manage your Amazon EC2 instances with Chef. knife EC2 makes it possible to create and bootstrap Amazon EC2 instances in just one line - if you go … Continue reading Knife EC2: Manage Amazon EC2 Instances With Chef
Kanban vs Scrum vs Agile
When inflexible and wasteful software development processes are making your organization inefficient, it's time to introduce an agile methodology. Kanban vs Scrum then becomes an essential question: Which agile software development methodology is better suited for my own situation? And is Kanban agile? What about Scrum vs agile? Confusion is spreading... Let's have a look … Continue reading Kanban vs Scrum vs Agile
Enable Your Teams to Rapidly Ship and Operate Quality Software
How often do your development teams release to production? Who gets the alert in the middle of the night when everything crashes and burns? Do these questions make you uncomfortable or rather their answers? Or maybe you are already discussing changes to your current deploy process? Because it sucks, right? If you're honest, it will … Continue reading Enable Your Teams to Rapidly Ship and Operate Quality Software
Supporting Millions of Pretty URL Rewrites in Nginx with Lua and Redis
About a year ago, I was tasked with greatly expanding our url rewrite capabilities. Our file based, nginx rewrites were becoming a performance bottleneck and we needed to make an architectural leap that would take us to the next level of SEO wizardry. In comparison to the total number of product categories in our database, … Continue reading Supporting Millions of Pretty URL Rewrites in Nginx with Lua and Redis
3 Reasons Why Your Team Needs Rituals
It's the same every morning: you get up and grab your morning coffee. No matter whether you brew it at home or fetch it on the road, your morning coffee is a ritual you never want to miss. A ritual is a practice everyone knows how to do. It's conducted regularly or on well defined … Continue reading 3 Reasons Why Your Team Needs Rituals
Agile Web Operations 