A couple of months ago I took and passed the Amazon Web Services Certified Solutions Architect Associate (AWS CSAA for those not in the mood to be verbose) exam.
Category: TILT
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Brothers Gonna wrk It Out
I’ve been working with the wrk benchmarking tool to… well, do exactly as the label says: to produce specific workloads against cloud systems to affect performance improvements. While there are a number of different options available to run such tests, a colleague’s familiarity with this product and his hearty recommendation were the reasons to go with wrk.
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Ubuntu-step Across Texas
I’d set up a Virtualbox VM as a portable “surfing machine” with which I can connect to my OpenVPN server. However, once I’d initiated a connection with the server, I wasn’t able to browse anywhere. A bit of Google-fu showed that apparently Ubuntu 16.04 loses DNS after connecting with OpenVPN, and by adding nameserver 8.8.8.8 (or pick your favorite DNS server) to /etc/resolvconf/resolv.conf.d/head solves this issue.
Link for future reference: https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2352821
Using a VPN used to be the sort of badge of honor indicating that you did something important enough for your corporate overlords to grant you access to the company network through the magick Cisco tunnel (yeah, so you’re having to sling pivot tables off the office file server over the weekend, but hey, you dontcha feel special?!). Now, especially with the net neutrality repeal, everyone’s getting a VPN, and it’s not just to stream BBC’s iPlayer from the States.
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Let’s Encrypt? Sure, Why Not?
The question “Would you put your credit card info on a website that doesn’t have the love green padlock?” should elicit the same vehemently negative response as “Would you wade through a pool of piranhas without wearing chainmail?” Admittedly an SSL certificate isn’t the be all end all of safe browsing, but it’s a rather visible baseline indicator of how seriously the site owner takes security. It’s like what a friend told me about OSHA inspectors: they look for bad housekeeping and a sloppy work area, as they’re indicative of much bigger problems.
I’d first heard of Mautic on the first day of my internship with InboundRx (and truth be told that’s the first time I’d heard of marketing automation – I’ve worked with web analytics and email marketing campaigns, but the idea of setting stages and points for your participants and having software facilitate the process flow was something that lay outside my loop until then). The idea was to use this as an alternative to Hubspot which is regarded as the proverbial Cadillac of such services (with features and price tag to go with that), and we were tasked with customizing this open source tool with modified branding and launching an instance of it on the cloud.
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Eight Days and Thirty-Seven Commits Later
And I have myself a custom WordPress theme, created almost from scratch. Well, almost a complete custom WP theme. I’m still working on it. Yeah, yeah, WordPress, blah, blah, it’s everywhere, it’s stupid simple, it’s not what the cool kids do… or so they say! I’d spent the closing months of 2016 learning how to customize Drupal, which by consensus is the more sophisticated sibling of WordPress in the CMS family, yet I kept thinking to myself, “I gotta spend time with WordPress!”
I’d been wresting with SASS over the last couple of days while working on a WordPress custom theme, and while my brain feels like it’s been kneaded a bit, I gotta say I’m pretty chuffed with what I’m able to figure out.
As a simple exercise in site-building, I’d decided to recreate an existing corporate website (originally made with Drupal 7) in WordPress. No, I won’t tell you which website, but as far as getting the baseline platform up and running went, WP is truly hard to beat in terms of ease and speed.
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Setting Mautic Afloat in the Cloud
For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been working with Mautic, the open-source inbound marketing automation tool. Thus far I’ve set up Mautic on:
- Cloud 9 development environment
- Heroku (unsuccessfully – see below)
- Digital Ocean Droplet
- GoDaddy Virtual Private Server
With the current version, Mautic dropped support for Postgres, which seems to be the database of choice for Heroku (I set up one of our Epicodus group projects there and had to migrate the database from MySQL to Postgres), and trying to get the app to work with CloudDB and Google SQL weren’t terribly successful. So, no Heroku for you. Or for me.