A year or so ago I mothballed one of my projects by dumping the database to AWS DynamoDB and throwing a static JS site up on AWS S3. This allowed me to still query the data, but only pay for it when I was actually using it rather than keeping the $20/mo server running 24/7. Recently though, I’ve decided to…
A few years ago I switched my “business” code from Github to Gitlab. The reason for this was… well, I was bootstrapping a business. Every dollar counts, and Github’s private repos were $5/mo while Gitlab was free. Unfortunately almost immediately after I switched everything, Microsoft bought Github and started offering free private repos. I should have switched back immediately. But…
In a massive update to Inexpire, I’ve added tracking tools for my hobby farm. If you are unfamiliar with Inexpire, I wrote about it in a recent post. Inexpire was built to track canned goods and other long-life-yet-perishable items that I might forget about until after they’ve gone bad. I built this tool partially because we stocked up on food…
Dating back for decades now, most major companies and enterprises have had “security” teams. Sometimes called “IT Security” or “infrastructure security” or something along those lines. This group was responsible for everything from security policies to risk reviews to approving firewall changes. Sometimes they’d own things like IDS/IPS, anti-virus, and often strictly security tools like a SIEM, a WAF, or…
Recently I launched a new web app called Inexpire. It’s something I’ve been kicking around for about a year but finally got it out the door. Since I’m a fan of “build in public”, let’s walk through the app. What is Inexpire? Inexpire.com is a web application designed to track expiration dates and inventory numbers of things in your house.…
Salesforce bought Heroku in 2010. What have they done since then? To be fair, I started using Heroku in 2015, 5 years after Salesforce bought them. But the last time they updated their pricing was 2015, and the last new notable feature was 2015. What have they done in the last five years? This article is mostly sourced from Hacker…
Adding text to an image… how hard could it be? Turns out not that hard, but still quite complicated. Here‘s the story behind Memendous.com. Concepts used:AWS Lambda/API Gateway/S3A custom Lambda LayerServerless FrameworkPython 3.x with Pillow (for the backend Lambda)Vanilla JS/HTML for the front endAWS Amplify for hosting I‘ve been looking for more serverless projects to get under my belt, and…
AWS Lambda ships with some software packages pre-installed, depending on which language runtime you pick. But what if you need something else? Typically in a serverfull environment you would install the package (or add it to your Cloudformation/Terraform/etc scripts) and be done with it. But in Lambda your options are a bit more limited. You can‘t just install something and…
As widely reported across the Internet, a woman has died as the result of a ransomware attack. I want to say that this drives home the importance of information security, but the reality is, this isn’t the first time someone’s life was ruined by security breaches. It might be the first time someone has died, but Stuxnet and Equifax and…
Long title, I know. Sorry. As I’ve mentioned in the past, my preferred computing device right now is an iPad Pro. That’s enabled by my favorite development environment, AWS Cloud9. A complete end-to-end dev environment in the cloud, accessed through a browser? It’s a dream come true! But not everything is sunshine and roses. While it works, it doesn’t always…