Docker Volumes: Why, When, and Which Ones?

Docker volumes are used to persist data from within a Docker container. There are a few different types of Docker volumes: host, anonymous, and, named. Knowing what the difference is and when to use each type can be difficult, but hopefully, I can ease that pain here.

Why Z Shell Is the Best Choice for Beginners

What is Z shell? And why should you use it instead of another shell like Bash?

A Gentle Introduction to Local Development with Docker Compose

Getting started with Docker can be a bit overwhelming. There are images, containers, Dockerfiles, docker-compose, etc. In this post, I’ll give a quick introduction to using docker-compose with PHP and MySQL.

Getting More Space in Your VMware Fusion Windows Virtual Machine

If you’ve used VMware Fusion to run Windows on your Mac for any length of time, this is probably a familiar sight: Fusion only gives your Windows virtual machine 60 gigabytes of space, which may seem like plenty at first—but it rapidly fills up. Thankfully, there’s a relatively easy way to expand your space, as […]

The Case for Build Definitions as Code

There are compelling reasons to define your build definitions in code. While it may take some extra effort to make the switch, here are four great reasons to do so.

Handling an AWS NAT Gateway Implicit Dependency with Terraform

Terraform does a great job of automatically optimizing the creation and modification of obvious dependent resources (correctly ordering and chaining operations). However, it cannot always know about other dependencies implicit in the infrastructure.

Moving Task Groups to YAML Builds in Azure DevOps

The Pipelines in Azure DevOps now support defining build configurations with YAML files. This is a huge advantage if your project is anything like my team’s and requires you to reproduce old builds.

Creating Amplify Email Campaigns in JavaScript

On my current project, we are using AWS Amplify to manage cloud infrastructure. One of the reasons we’re using Amplify is to send targeted emails to our users through AWS’s analytics tool, Pinpoint. Setting up an email channel through Amplify turned out to require extra work since, at the time of writing this blog post, […]

Creating Custom CloudWatch Alarms for AWS Lambdas

AWS allows you to setup CloudWatch alarms on many performance-related metrics. Doing this for metrics like CPU load or storage use is trivial. However, setting up custom alarms based on events or errors in a log isn’t as straightforward. By the end of this post, you should know how to set up alarms based on […]

Pattern Matching without Regex! – Introducing the Rosie Pattern Language

Recently, I was able to attend Jamie Jenning’s talk on the Rosie Pattern Language (RPL/“Rosie”) at Strange Loop 2018. I had not previously been aware of Rosie, but after learning about it, I am extremely excited about the prospect of never writing another regular expression again.

Atomic Spin

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DevOps & System Admin.