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.

Docker Command-Line Tips for Beginners

While I often utilize Docker as part of a hosting and deployment system, I also use it locally for all sorts of exploration, spikes, and development. There are a couple of especially useful patterns and invocations that I show to people when I am introducing them to Docker and its usage.

Making Practical Use of OpenSSL’s s_client

I frequently troubleshoot SSL/TLS server configurations, X.509 certificates, and other SSL/TLS-related concerns. One of the most useful utilities in my toolbox is OpenSSL. I use it for a huge number of tasks: generating new X.509 certificate signing requests, generating random strings for encryption keys, retrieving server X.509 certificates, testing support SSL/TLS ciphers, etc.

Checking for GraphQL Errors with JMeter

JMeter is a load testing tool for a variety of network services. It supports features such as parameterization, assertions, cookies, and additional functionality through plug-ins.

Creating Zendesk Tickets from Slack Slash Command

We use Zendesk to help manage internal support requests that the IT operations team handles internally. Zendesk provides multiple methods (or channels) to submit requests, such as e-mail and the Zendesk Guide (Help Center). However, most internal communication with the IT operations team now occurs via Slack. In order to make submitting requests easier, I […]

Preparing to Launch a New Application – Domain Registration & DNS Hosting

One of the most consistently under-recognized operations in preparing to launch a new web application, particularly if migrating from an old one, is managing DNS (domain name system) concerns.

Coordinated Cache Refill with Redis and Node

After launching a new Node.js app we built as part of a recent redesign for a high-volume site, we found some performance problems occurring every five minutes:

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