If you're using Amazon's PaaS offering, Elastic Beanstalk, you're more than likely using .EBExtensions to control the configuration or other aspects of your applications. And I'm sure, As any responsible devloper/admin would, you're cleaning up after yourself as well... right?
»After wrestling with a .NET app that wasn't excluding the "packages" directory from the repo, I realized I had missed a crucial and obvious step... I forgot to commit the change to finalize the removal. Talk about one of those "you forgot a comma" moments...
»I was recently asked when it made sense to choose to architect an application based on micro-services vs the more common approach of using a more centralized core framework or codebase. Answering this over Twitter is simply impossible as the answer isn't simple. In fact, there's a lot that needs to be considered as the decision extends well beyond just the code.
»I have a number of Linux-based applications that have been using the .ebextensions functionality of Elastic Beanstalk for quite some time. Its a great way of managing the configuration of your environments and running tasks both pre and post-deploy. However, one of my current projects is a C# .NET app and it took me a while to remember how to create a folder in Windows with a leading (.) period. It seems so trivial, but, honestly, I can't recall the last time I've had to do it - chances are many of you can't either.
»While this won't get you bleeding edge 0.12.x, it will it will get you a relatively recent and stable version of 0.10.x. This probably isn't a bad thing as 0.12.x is pretty new and not everything supports it - yet.
»This year I plan on changing up the process just a little bit. While I still want to have a few goals that are for the year as a whole, I also want to come up with one super simple and achievable items for each month. The reason for this is that, upon reviewing last year, it became clear that there wasn't a whole lot to keep things happening. So, this year I want to ensure that there are activities with enough frequency to keep the engagement and excitement - while still being realistic.
»For the past few years I've made a list of the things I would like to accomplish in the new year. For the most part, these items are more than resolutions; they're meant as a plan of attack for personal growth and development. Each item is something personal to me, is meant to be actionable and something I honestly hope to accomplish. Of course, a year is quite a bit of time, so anything can happen. Lets see how I did...
»A topic that has come up in many discussions for me recently is DevOps. Its an important thing to understand, but I'm finding a lot of people have some serious misconceptions about what it is and actually means. This is surprising due to how common a practice it has become. For instance, AWS re:Invent had an entire track dedicated to DevOps. Regardless, its interesting to hear peoples thoughts on the subject.
»Over the past six months, the Ghost blogging platform has made some huge waves in the blogging world. It has a responsive, streamlined interface that gets out of the way and enables authors to blog quickly and efficiently. At a time when WordPress is growing more and more complex, this is a breath of fresh air. And, even in its pre-1.0 release status, the platform is undoubtedly stable and usable.
»Back in May, Amazon introduced the ability to tag your Beanstalk environments. This is great for anyone that properly uses tags to monitor, track and account for the resources they are using. One challenge that I've run into recently, though, is that this is only during the creation of an environment; AWS currently doesnt offer the ability to add, remove or update tags to existing environments.
»Every year, a large chunk of the people who set resolutions are destined for failure. Complete and utter failure. While we can all speculate the reasons, more often than not, it comes down to a combination of procrastination, unactionable goals and lack of a clear game plan. Seriously.
»Yes, another post on Mcrypt, but this time for OSX Mavericks. I cannot stress how frustrated I was when upgrading to Mountain Lion hosed my web development environment, let alone when it did it again upgrading to Mavericks. Here is a great post on compiling PHP 5.4.17 with Mcrypt on OSX 10.9.
»Having problems installing PHP5-MCrypt on Ubuntu 13.10? You're not alone. Apparently this is a bug with the latest version of Ubuntu, where they changed the default location for php modules, but mcrypt was apparently left behind. For full details and a workaround, feel free to visit this Ubuntu Stack Exchange thread.
»Starting from scratch, with severely limited free time, has been a challenge - to say the least. However, it has afforded me a few luxuries; most notable is that I can truly start fresh. Because of this, I have taken quite a bit of time to step back and evaluate new directions. My current company, Epoxy Labs, has served me well for many years. However, much of the work I have produced under that entity is either locked away behind NDA's or no longer online. This was by design; it was meant to provide income and experience, not an elaborate, hyped portfolio. It also worked out well because my work spoke for itself and word of mouth recommendations replaced any need for ever advertising my services. However, times are changing - as is the model for the web. Custom, contract-driven, one-off solutions are no longer the value proposition that I want to target. Instead, I feel that its time to move on to something new. My goal now is to create a fresh company with a focus on delivering simple, intuitive and elegant SaaS solutions; read: products. These need to be so compelling that the ROI is instantly understandable and the barrier to purchase must be incredibly low. They need to be worth their weight in gold, but cost the same as tin.
»I have finally gotten The Tomboy and the Geek back online! This is third site I needed to restore and is right in-line with my Year of the Hustle post. This particular site is meant to help keep our friends and family in the loop with what we've been up to. The site previously housed years worth of pictures and content, so it will take a while to get the old content (as much as we still have) republished and available.
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