archive

This is a quick work around until I've had a good think about a way to organise the archive.

2019

Adding missing functionality to Terraform - I needed to codify the creation of PostgreSQL read replicas, so I did a bit of research around ways I could do this quickly without...
Learning about eBPF on macOS - I've created this is a short post to talk about a new GitHub repo that might be useful to some: vagrant-bcctools. It's a simple Vagrant box...
AWS DevOps Pro Certification Blog Post Series: Exam Time! - This is part of the blog post series: AWS DevOps Pro Certification Caveat emptor Using AWS costs money, some of these services may not be part of...
AWS DevOps Pro Certification Blog Post Series: Study Gaps - This is part of the blog post series: AWS DevOps Pro Certification Caveat emptor Using AWS costs money, some of these services may not be part of...
AWS DevOps Pro Certification Blog Post Series: Databases - This is part of the blog post series: AWS DevOps Pro Certification Caveat emptor Using AWS costs money, some of these services may not be part of...
AWS DevOps Pro Certification Blog Post Series: Amazon Single Signon, CloudFront, Autoscaling and Route53 - This is part of the blog post series: AWS DevOps Pro Certification Caveat emptor Using AWS costs money, some of these services may not be part of...
AWS DevOps Pro Certification Blog Post Series: High Availability, Fault Tolerance and Disaster Recovery - This is part of the blog post series: AWS DevOps Pro Certification What does the exam guide say? To pass this domain, you'll need to know the...
AWS DevOps Pro Certification Blog Post Series: Incident and Event Response - This is part of the blog post series: AWS DevOps Pro Certification What does the exam guide say? To pass this domain, you'll need to know the...
AWS DevOps Pro Certification Blog Post Series: Policy and Standards Automation - This is part of the blog post series: AWS DevOps Pro Certification What does the exam guide say? To pass this domain, you'll need to know the...
AWS DevOps Pro Certification Blog Post Series: AWS X-Ray - This is part of the blog post series: AWS DevOps Pro Certification Caveat emptor Using AWS costs money, some of these services may not be part of...
AWS DevOps Pro Certification Blog Post Series: CloudWatch - This is part of the blog post series: AWS DevOps Pro Certification Caveat emptor Using AWS costs money, some of these services may not be part of...
AWS DevOps Pro Certification Blog Post Series: Monitoring and Logging - This is part of the blog post series: AWS DevOps Pro Certification What does the exam guide say? To pass this domain, you'll need to know the...
AWS DevOps Pro Certification Blog Post Series: AWS Config and Managed Services - This is part of the blog post series: AWS DevOps Pro Certification Caveat emptor Using AWS costs money, some of these services may not be part of...
AWS DevOps Pro Certification Blog Post Series: AWS ECS - This is part of the blog post series: AWS DevOps Pro Certification Caveat emptor Using AWS costs money, some of these services may not be part of...
AWS DevOps Pro Certification Blog Post Series: AWS Lambda - This is part of the blog post series: AWS DevOps Pro Certification Caveat emptor Using AWS costs money, some of these services may not be part of...
AWS DevOps Pro Certification Blog Post Series: OpsWorks - This is part of the blog post series: AWS DevOps Pro Certification Caveat emptor Using AWS costs money, some of these services may not be part of...
AWS DevOps Pro Certification Blog Post Series: Elastic Beanstalk - This is part of the blog post series: AWS DevOps Pro Certification Caveat emptor Using AWS costs money, some of these services may not be part of...
AWS DevOps Pro Certification Blog Post Series: CloudFormation - This is part of the blog post series: AWS DevOps Pro Certification Caveat emptor Using AWS costs money, some of these services may not be part of...
AWS DevOps Pro Certification Blog Post Series: Configuration Management and Infrastructure as Code introduction - This is part of the blog post series: AWS DevOps Pro Certification What does the exam guide say? To pass this domain, you'll need to know the...
AWS DevOps Pro Certification Blog Post Series: Code Pipeline - This is part of the blog post series: AWS DevOps Pro Certification Caveat emptor Using AWS costs money, some of these services may not be part of...
AWS DevOps Pro Certification Blog Post Series: Code Deploy - This is part of the blog post series: AWS DevOps Pro Certification Caveat emptor Using AWS costs money, some of these services may not be part of...
AWS DevOps Pro Certification Blog Post Series: Code Build - This is part of the blog post series: AWS DevOps Pro Certification Caveat emptor Using AWS costs money, some of these services may not be part of...
AWS DevOps Pro Certification Blog Post Series: Code Commit - This is part of the blog post series: AWS DevOps Pro Certification Caveat emptor Using AWS costs money, some of these services may not be part of...
AWS DevOps Pro Certification Blog Post Series: SDLC automation introduction - This is part of the blog post series: AWS DevOps Pro Certification What does the exam guide say? To pass this domain, you'll need to know the...
AWS DevOps Pro Certification Blog Post Series - This is the start of a blog post series about studying for the AWS DevOps Professional certification. Background First a bit of background about me, I'm an...
Gatsby and WordPress: Summary - We've reached the end of our blog series, so what have we learnt? Gatsby has a great starter template that is highly performant (gatsby new). Whilst...
Gatsby and WordPress: Yarr! Cutlasses and WebHooks! - We’re almost finished! All we need to do is get WordPress to tell Netlify when we’ve published any new posts. To do this, we’ll use...
Gatsby and WordPress: Netlify or Die! - We’re done with our new site, it’s time to setup Netlify. Install gatsby-cli in your repo (netlify needs it to build your site): npm install --save...
Gatsby and WordPress: Creating WordPress Page Types - WordPress Pages are another Post Type, they differ from Post Post(!) Types insofar that they aren’t time-related or be assigned categories and tags. Generally, they’re...
Gatsby and WordPress: Creating an index page - Order order! Let’s create an index to list our posts Let’s visit http://localhost::8000/___graphql to fire up the builtin GraphQL explorer and paste the following query. { ...
Gatsby and WordPress: Creating Content - Pulling in content from WordPress Now that we’ve verified that the plugin can pull in data from our WordPress site, let’s start creating static content based...
Gatsby and WordPress: Setup - This is the start of a blog post series about creating Gatsby site with content pulled in from a WordPress site. Setup Create a new Gatsby site...
Gatsby and WordPress: Keeping it cheap and staying in touch - This is the start of a blog post series about creating Gatsby site with content pulled in from a WordPress site. Gatsby is a static site...

2018

When is a MySQL error not a MySQL error - I came across this error recently: Mysql2::Error: Can't connect to MySQL server on 'some-db-server.example.com' (113) A quick search on the Internet, resulted in various Q &...
Craft as a Fox - This is part of my "Blogging my Homework" blog post series, the introductory post can be found here. Caveat emptor: any errors or misunderstanding around concepts...
Being a Hedgehog - Part Two - This is part of my "Blogging my Homework" blog post series, the introductory post can be found here. Caveat emptor: any errors or misunderstanding around concepts...
Being a Hedgehog - Part One - This is part of my "Blogging my Homework" blog post series, the introductory post can be found here. Caveat emptor: any errors or misunderstanding around concepts...
Blogging my Homework - The company I work for Made Tech care about their employees' personal development. They take this matter so seriously that on Friday afternoons, we spend...
Building and installing a Ready game on iOS - I’ve been playing around with Ready which is a lovely and easy to use tool that allows you to create video games. Ready is aimed...
Let's Encrypt certificate renewal without downtime - Warning: this blog post assumes the following: you are running nginx in a Docker container. Let’s Encrypt has been configured correctly in the nginx container. You are...
Version Management for Ruby, Python, Node and Rust - Here's a handy cheat sheet if you find yourself needing an exotic version of Ruby, Python, Node or Rust. Other version management tools are available...
How to run Rust in OpenFaaS - I’ve been getting into Kubernetes in a big way, this is partly thanks to it being bundled in Docker for Mac Edge edition. Once I'd learnt...
A sketchpad project based on Sinatra, Nginx using docker-compose - I recently came across a monolithic application at work that used various frameworks, which in turn made extending existing routes very difficult to implement. The general...
Mozilla Global Sprint - I wanted to share my experience of participating at Mozilla's Global Sprint 2018. The Global Sprint runs once a year and is a two day...
Tunnelling TCP over DNS in 2018 - I wrote this article after seeing that no one had written anything about tunnelling tcp traffic over dns since 2016. A common use of this...
Open source tools and work proxies - I often use a lot of open source tooling at work, initially I started with with node and npm (for our front end), and more...
Rust2018 - A year of talks - Background: This my blog post for the Rust team's request for community blog posts. Before I address my hopes for Rust in 2018, I thought I'd...
Flocking shell - Yesterday, I had an interesting problem. My cron task spawned hundreds of copies of itself because it was blocking on a database call. If a...

2017

Porting python turtle examples to turtle.rs - I've been tinkering around with the Rust version of Turtle graphics. Turtle graphics, was a key feature of the programming language Logo, and has frequently...
London Perl Workshop 2017 - Almost a month a go, around the same time as Mozilla Fest, Neil Bowers put out a request for a Rust talk via twitter. I would love someone to...
MozFest 2017 Rust Resources - Here's the websites I've been touting at MozFest: The API documentation for the rand crate, to demonstrate the amazing detail and functionality you can add to...
Remote speaking tips - On Monday I did my first remote talk (for the Rust Edinburgh user group). I thought I'd share my experience to help others who want to do...
National Novel Generation Month 2016 Reflection - National Novel Generation Month aka NaNoGenMo is a month long contest to write code to generate a novel of 50k+ words. Before I start talking about...
Alexandria PL/SQL Utility Library - Imagine if BatMan was an Oracle DBA, his utility belt would be the Alexandria PL/SQL Utility Library. How to install Microsoft Office document parsers (OOXML) Assumptions This has...
Oracle tips - Hiding user input Sometimes you need to keep something secret (shoulder surfing), this will only work in SQL/Plus or Oracle SQL Developer (F5/Run script mode aka...
C Sharp and .NET tips - NUnit TestCases with instances of a type public IEnumerable<TestCaseData> CanParseAsThingyTestCases { get { Setup(); ...
A developer on-boarding guide for Rust - Background: We needed a meta reference for our study group event! Setting up your IDE/Code editor for Rust Nick's RLS showcase blog post booyaa's RLS talk - if...
Troubleshooting the Rust Language Server - To understand how to troubleshoot the Rust Language Server (RLS), it helps to know what RLS is and how the components interact. RLS is a Rust...
Regular Expressions Miscellany - Oracle related regular expressions regexp_count and regexp_replace functions Let say you have a column that contains source for an Oracle object. We want to extract documentation...
London Rust User Group Meetup No. 15 - Interwebs Fixed as of 0.3.2 2017-08-15 on #Rocket <Sergio> Quick announcement: latest Rust nightly breaks Rocket's lints. Please use a nightly between 2017-08-10 and 2017-08-13 while the...
Message Queue Miscellany - This is a bit of a hodge podge of message queue notes. Very IBM centric at the moment. Command line tools Cheatsheet SET MQSERVER=CHANNEL.NAME/TCP/HOST OR IP ADDRESS(PORT) AMQSPUTC QUEUENAME...
Using Rust with Visual Studio Code - Which extension? First off if you can, you should be using the Rust Language Server (RLS) extension. Yes it's beta, but the user experience has been...
Rust Language Server and Visual Studio Code - Click here to skip the history lesson and go straight to the tips. I first heard about the Rust Language Server (RLS), via Phil Dawes' Racer...
London Rust User Group Meetup No. 14 - Interwebs Cambridge Meetup No. 2 Request for Explanation Episode No. 2 - Stealing Chickens on the Internet. No. 4 landed on Monday! RustFest Zurich CFP: closes July 23rd...
Cargo cult - the problem with copying existing code - A quick note to myself on how to identify build errors. This is also a timely reminder that you should create code from scratch once in...
SSIS Variable Dispenser Template - I don't write enough SSIS script blob tasks to commit this to memory. This is the safest way to access variables without inadvertantly locking them...
ORDS tips - XML over ORDS Turns out you can emit XML via ORDS. I'll assume you have a working ORDS install and the schema is already enabled BEGIN ...
Add support for tags to Cobalt - A while back I started adding a new front matter attribute to all my posts called tags. I initially did this to improve my site search...
Setting up exercism python track with Visual Studio Code - Here's a fairly good setup for getting the python track of exercism working with virtual env and Visual Studio Code. virtual env create one, and install the following...
python tips - A random collection of Python tips, I also write Python code in MacOS and raspbian so you'll see tips for those platforms. Docker images (python related) httpbin -...
youtube-dl gems - A handy collection of youtube-dl incantations, remember it's not just for youtube-dl! There's plenty more, but these are the one use I use on a...
Adding an archive page to your Cobalt blog - To avoid slowing down the index page, there's a point where you need to limit how many blog posts you want to appear on screen. This...
Flashback, what did this data look like previously? - I'm only scratching the surface of what you can do with flashbacks in Oracle. Our DBAs are absolute ninjas when it comes to using this...
SQL Developer's new format hints - One of my favourite cool features in SQL Developer is the ability to turn a sql query output into an entirely different format. It doesn't even...
Bitmasks in SQL - bitmasks are really handy way to express predicates without becoming overly verbose with parens and logical operators (AND and OR). Assume we have the following table. |...
Dirty Dynamic SQL - Not all dynamic sql is strictly for immediate execution, nor is it dirty (I needed aninteresting title). I learnt this tricks from my friend at work,...
When XML attacks! - At some point in your xml wrangling career you will hit an node whose data is too big for Oracle's EXTRACTVALUE (I think the upper limit...
Bind vs Substitution variables - I always have difficulty remember the difference between these type of variables. Although now, that I've started doing a lot of ORDS related work, the difference...
PL/SQL script to query a refcursor - This will probably work in pipelined functions or packages too. Note the use of the bind variable to link the PL/SQL script variables to the out...
Defensive coding in SQL - Always wrap ON clauses in parens to avoid predicates being deleted accidentally. The following code will scream if you delete the AND clause. SELECT * FROM...
Collapsible Sections in HTML - But first a demo... Works great in GitHub! (click me) Dipshit with a nine-toed woman. Dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit praesent ac...
See hidden files in Finder - If you search for how to do this, you get a lot of nonsense involving messing with defaults write and horrific applescript bodges. CMD + SHIFT...
Using pre-built lunr indexes - I've implemented pre-built indexes vs. on demand i.e. generating them when the search page is being loaded. I'm not entirely happy with the solution yet...
Useful git commmands - Commit logs Now that I've started adding useful commit messages it's really use to make sense of my commits, more so when you use single line mode. $...
Adding search to your cobalt site - Part Two - This will be a two part post, where I detail the steps it took to enable search on my Cobalt site. As you may have gathered...
Adding search to your cobalt site - Part One - This will be a two part post, where I detail the steps it took to enable search on my Cobalt site. In this first post I...
Useful commit messages - Keeping a copy of this excellent bit of advice until I've committed (no pun) it to memory. feat: add hat wobble ^--^ ^------------^ | ...
Add reading time in Cobalt - I wanted to add an approximate reading time to each of my blog posts, like those seen in medium posts. There's a lot of really...
Using a custom domain with GitHub Pages - It took far too long to work out how to do this on the GitHub help pages... Assumptions: I've only tested for personal/user domain i.e. the doc...
Using Cobalt with GitHub pages - It turns out using Cobalt and your personal GitHub page is a bit trickier to setup. Your personal GitHub page as oppose to your repo...
MacBook Air Setup - Here's my current setup for my MacBook Air Setup. I use a range of tools like homebrew, Visual Studio Code and vim. homebrew brew install \ ...
Code generation scripts in PL/SQL - Flattening XML paths The table elephant_castle has a XMLTYPE column details that we want to get a list of distinct node paths. WITH node_list AS ( ...