booyaa's boggy bloggy

Adding missing functionality to Terraform

Sun, 27 Oct 2019 13:37:00 +0000

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 diving into the Terraform provider.

Learning about eBPF on macOS

Sun, 13 Oct 2019 13:37:00 +0000

I've created this is a short post to talk about a new GitHub repo that might be useful to some: vagrant-bcctools.

AWS DevOps Pro Certification Blog Post Series: Exam Time!

Tue, 09 Jul 2019 13:37:00 +0000

This is part of the blog post series: AWS DevOps Pro Certification

AWS DevOps Pro Certification Blog Post Series: Study Gaps

Sat, 22 Jun 2019 13:37:00 +0000

This is part of the blog post series: AWS DevOps Pro Certification

AWS DevOps Pro Certification Blog Post Series: Databases

Fri, 14 Jun 2019 13:37:00 +0000

This is part of the blog post series: AWS DevOps Pro Certification

AWS DevOps Pro Certification Blog Post Series: Amazon Single Signon, CloudFront, Autoscaling and Route53

Wed, 12 Jun 2019 13:37:00 +0000

This is part of the blog post series: AWS DevOps Pro Certification

AWS DevOps Pro Certification Blog Post Series: High Availability, Fault Tolerance and Disaster Recovery

Sat, 08 Jun 2019 10:32:02 +0000

This is part of the blog post series: AWS DevOps Pro Certification

AWS DevOps Pro Certification Blog Post Series: Incident and Event Response

Thu, 06 Jun 2019 16:25:00 +0000

This is part of the blog post series: AWS DevOps Pro Certification

AWS DevOps Pro Certification Blog Post Series: Policy and Standards Automation

Wed, 05 Jun 2019 14:19:02 +0000

This is part of the blog post series: AWS DevOps Pro Certification

AWS DevOps Pro Certification Blog Post Series: AWS X-Ray

Wed, 05 Jun 2019 13:16:00 +0000

This is part of the blog post series: AWS DevOps Pro Certification

AWS DevOps Pro Certification Blog Post Series: CloudWatch

Wed, 05 Jun 2019 10:04:00 +0000

This is part of the blog post series: AWS DevOps Pro Certification

AWS DevOps Pro Certification Blog Post Series: Monitoring and Logging

Tue, 04 Jun 2019 13:37:02 +0000

This is part of the blog post series: AWS DevOps Pro Certification

AWS DevOps Pro Certification Blog Post Series: AWS Config and Managed Services

Tue, 04 Jun 2019 13:37:01 +0000

This is part of the blog post series: AWS DevOps Pro Certification

AWS DevOps Pro Certification Blog Post Series: AWS ECS

Tue, 04 Jun 2019 13:37:00 +0000

This is part of the blog post series: AWS DevOps Pro Certification

AWS DevOps Pro Certification Blog Post Series: AWS Lambda

Sat, 01 Jun 2019 13:37:00 +0000

This is part of the blog post series: AWS DevOps Pro Certification

AWS DevOps Pro Certification Blog Post Series: OpsWorks

Fri, 31 May 2019 13:37:00 +0000

This is part of the blog post series: AWS DevOps Pro Certification

AWS DevOps Pro Certification Blog Post Series: Elastic Beanstalk

Thu, 30 May 2019 13:37:00 +0000

This is part of the blog post series: AWS DevOps Pro Certification

AWS DevOps Pro Certification Blog Post Series: CloudFormation

Mon, 27 May 2019 13:37:00 +0000

This is part of the blog post series: AWS DevOps Pro Certification

AWS DevOps Pro Certification Blog Post Series: Configuration Management and Infrastructure as Code introduction

Sat, 11 May 2019 13:37:00 +0000

This is part of the blog post series: AWS DevOps Pro Certification

AWS DevOps Pro Certification Blog Post Series: Code Pipeline

Wed, 10 Apr 2019 13:37:00 +0000

This is part of the blog post series: AWS DevOps Pro Certification

AWS DevOps Pro Certification Blog Post Series: Code Deploy

Fri, 29 Mar 2019 13:37:00 +0000

This is part of the blog post series: AWS DevOps Pro Certification

AWS DevOps Pro Certification Blog Post Series: Code Build

Wed, 27 Mar 2019 13:37:00 +0000

This is part of the blog post series: AWS DevOps Pro Certification

AWS DevOps Pro Certification Blog Post Series: Code Commit

Tue, 26 Mar 2019 13:37:00 +0000

This is part of the blog post series: AWS DevOps Pro Certification

AWS DevOps Pro Certification Blog Post Series: SDLC automation introduction

Mon, 25 Mar 2019 13:37:00 +0000

This is part of the blog post series: AWS DevOps Pro Certification

AWS DevOps Pro Certification Blog Post Series

Sun, 24 Mar 2019 13:37:00 +0000

This is the start of a blog post series about studying for the AWS DevOps Professional certification.

Gatsby and WordPress: Summary

Mon, 07 Jan 2019 13:37:00 +0000

We've reached the end of our blog series, so what have we learnt?

Gatsby and WordPress: Yarr! Cutlasses and WebHooks!

Sun, 06 Jan 2019 13:37:00 +0000

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 webhooks.

Gatsby and WordPress: Netlify or Die!

Sat, 05 Jan 2019 13:37:00 +0000

We’re done with our new site, it’s time to setup Netlify.

Gatsby and WordPress: Creating WordPress Page Types

Fri, 04 Jan 2019 13:37:00 +0000

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 used for navigational items like About, Contact or Archive pages.

Gatsby and WordPress: Creating an index page

Thu, 03 Jan 2019 13:37:00 +0000

Order order! Let’s create an index to list our posts

Gatsby and WordPress: Creating Content

Wed, 02 Jan 2019 13:37:00 +0000

Pulling in content from WordPress

Gatsby and WordPress: Setup

Tue, 01 Jan 2019 13:37:01 +0000

This is the start of a blog post series about creating Gatsby site with content pulled in from a WordPress site.

Gatsby and WordPress: Keeping it cheap and staying in touch

Tue, 01 Jan 2019 13:37:00 +0000

This is the start of a blog post series about creating Gatsby site with content pulled in from a WordPress site.

When is a MySQL error not a MySQL error

Tue, 09 Oct 2018 20:20:00 +0000

I came across this error recently: Mysql2::Error: Can't connect to MySQL server on 'some-db-server.example.com' (113)

Craft as a Fox

Fri, 28 Sep 2018 18:31:00 +0000

This is part of my "Blogging my Homework" blog post series, the introductory post can be found here.

Being a Hedgehog - Part Two

Fri, 21 Sep 2018 14:55:00 +0000

This is part of my "Blogging my Homework" blog post series, the introductory post can be found here.

Being a Hedgehog - Part One

Tue, 18 Sep 2018 08:59:00 +0000

This is part of my "Blogging my Homework" blog post series, the introductory post can be found here.

Blogging my Homework

Sat, 15 Sep 2018 19:38:00 +0000

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 this time honing our skills. To help focus our studies we began working on material that forms the basis of our core skills assessments.

Building and installing a Ready game on iOS

Sat, 15 Sep 2018 13:37:00 +0000

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 at the class room to teach kids about the basics of programming in a fun way, if you’ve seen Scratch, you’ll know what I’m talking about.

Let's Encrypt certificate renewal without downtime

Wed, 12 Sep 2018 18:26:00 +0000

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 awesome for reading this blog.

Version Management for Ruby, Python, Node and Rust

Sun, 19 Aug 2018 15:04:51 +0000

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 for ruby, python and node, I just happen to like these ones.

How to run Rust in OpenFaaS

Sat, 04 Aug 2018 15:04:47 +0000

I’ve been getting into Kubernetes in a big way, this is partly thanks to it being bundled in Docker for Mac Edge edition.

A sketchpad project based on Sinatra, Nginx using docker-compose

Sun, 22 Jul 2018 18:00:01 +0000

I recently came across a monolithic application at work that used various frameworks, which in turn made extending existing routes very difficult to implement.

Mozilla Global Sprint

Sun, 13 May 2018 16:29:50 +0000

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 hackathon event. The projects you can work on, have a central focus of promoting a healthy Internet.

Tunnelling TCP over DNS in 2018

Sun, 18 Mar 2018 13:38:32 +0000

I wrote this article after seeing that no one had written anything about tunnelling tcp traffic over dns since 2016.

Open source tools and work proxies

Sun, 04 Feb 2018 17:03:44 +0000

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 recently python, Go and of course Rust.

Rust2018 - A year of talks

Sun, 28 Jan 2018 19:49:54 +0000

Background: This my blog post for the Rust team's request for community blog posts.

Flocking shell

Wed, 10 Jan 2018 07:49:00 +0000

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 process spawns enough times, you'll eventually run out of file descriptors and will be unable to fork more processes. To avoid further repeats, I needed to add a check to see if the script was already running and exit early.

Porting python turtle examples to turtle.rs

Fri, 15 Dec 2017 08:11:04 +0000

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 been ported to other programming languages as a visual way to teach programming.

London Perl Workshop 2017

Tue, 28 Nov 2017 07:33:26 +0000

Almost a month a go, around the same time as Mozilla Fest, Neil Bowers put out a request for a Rust talk via twitter.

MozFest 2017 Rust Resources

Sat, 28 Oct 2017 12:36:38 +0100

Here's the websites I've been touting at MozFest:

Remote speaking tips

Fri, 20 Oct 2017 20:05:52 +0100

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 the same.

National Novel Generation Month 2016 Reflection

Thu, 12 Oct 2017 08:51:46 +0100

National Novel Generation Month aka NaNoGenMo is a month long contest to write code to generate a novel of 50k+ words.

Alexandria PL/SQL Utility Library

Wed, 11 Oct 2017 07:39:34 +0100

Imagine if BatMan was an Oracle DBA, his utility belt would be the Alexandria PL/SQL Utility Library.

Oracle tips

Thu, 28 Sep 2017 17:12:37 +0100

Hiding user input

C Sharp and .NET tips

Fri, 01 Sep 2017 07:33:15 +0100

NUnit TestCases with instances of a type

A developer on-boarding guide for Rust

Thu, 31 Aug 2017 18:49:38 +0100

Background: We needed a meta reference for our study group event!

Troubleshooting the Rust Language Server

Fri, 18 Aug 2017 08:36:53 +0100

To understand how to troubleshoot the Rust Language Server (RLS), it helps to know what RLS is and how the components interact.

Regular Expressions Miscellany

Thu, 17 Aug 2017 08:42:25 +0100

Oracle related regular expressions

London Rust User Group Meetup No. 15

Wed, 16 Aug 2017 17:43:45 +0100

Interwebs

Message Queue Miscellany

Sat, 12 Aug 2017 14:13:12 +0100

This is a bit of a hodge podge of message queue notes. Very IBM centric at the moment.

Using Rust with Visual Studio Code

Tue, 08 Aug 2017 07:39:42 +0100

Which extension?

Rust Language Server and Visual Studio Code

Mon, 24 Jul 2017 08:08:41 +0100

Click here to skip the history lesson and go straight to the tips.

London Rust User Group Meetup No. 14

Wed, 19 Jul 2017 17:56:21 +0100

Interwebs

Cargo cult - the problem with copying existing code

Wed, 19 Jul 2017 11:52:00 +0100

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 a while, rather than copying an existing project. This is a form of cargo cult (I've linked to the Wikipedia page in my references below, if you've never heard of the term before)

SSIS Variable Dispenser Template

Mon, 17 Jul 2017 16:00:00 +0100

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 after a crash.

ORDS tips

Thu, 13 Jul 2017 15:36:58 +0100

XML over ORDS

Add support for tags to Cobalt

Sun, 09 Jul 2017 10:07:03 +0100

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 indexing (you can read about that here).

Setting up exercism python track with Visual Studio Code

Tue, 04 Jul 2017 17:08:41 +0100

Here's a fairly good setup for getting the python track of exercism working with virtual env and Visual Studio Code.

python tips

Tue, 04 Jul 2017 16:54:51 +0100

A random collection of Python tips, I also write Python code in MacOS and raspbian so you'll see tips for those platforms.

youtube-dl gems

Tue, 04 Jul 2017 16:42:14 +0100

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 daily basis.

Adding an archive page to your Cobalt blog

Tue, 04 Jul 2017 16:13:01 +0100

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 in turn presents another problem, how do you then provide a way to display older posts? Enter an archive page!

Flashback, what did this data look like previously?

Sat, 01 Jul 2017 18:44:06 +0100

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 witchcraft from Oracle.

SQL Developer's new format hints

Sat, 01 Jul 2017 18:40:24 +0100

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 require breaking out the import/export wizard.

Bitmasks in SQL

Sat, 01 Jul 2017 18:27:29 +0100

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

Sat, 01 Jul 2017 18:19:52 +0100

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, he's a big believer of using sql to code generate more sql.

When XML attacks!

Sat, 01 Jul 2017 18:11:10 +0100

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 is 4000 characters) and get this lovely message.

Bind vs Substitution variables

Sat, 01 Jul 2017 18:02:45 +0100

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 is become more apparent.

PL/SQL script to query a refcursor

Sat, 01 Jul 2017 16:49:01 +0100

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 refcursor.

Defensive coding in SQL

Sat, 01 Jul 2017 16:33:04 +0100

Always wrap ON clauses in parens to avoid predicates being deleted accidentally. The following code will scream if you delete the AND clause.

Collapsible Sections in HTML

Sat, 01 Jul 2017 15:55:44 +0100

But first a demo...

See hidden files in Finder

Sat, 01 Jul 2017 14:21:50 +0100

If you search for how to do this, you get a lot of nonsense involving messing with defaults write and horrific applescript bodges.

Using pre-built lunr indexes

Thu, 22 Jun 2017 19:21:00 +0100

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 for the following reasons:

Useful git commmands

Thu, 22 Jun 2017 18:51:43 +0100

Commit logs

Adding search to your cobalt site - Part Two

Tue, 20 Jun 2017 08:35:51 +0100

This will be a two part post, where I detail the steps it took to enable search on my Cobalt site.

Adding search to your cobalt site - Part One

Tue, 20 Jun 2017 08:06:11 +0100

This will be a two part post, where I detail the steps it took to enable search on my Cobalt site.

Useful commit messages

Fri, 16 Jun 2017 09:09:18 +0100

Keeping a copy of this excellent bit of advice until I've committed (no pun) it to memory.

Add reading time in Cobalt

Thu, 15 Jun 2017 09:05:37 +0100

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 nice javascript libraries out that, but I kinda figured this defeat the whole purpose of using a static site generator.

Using a custom domain with GitHub Pages

Tue, 13 Jun 2017 08:02:54 +0100

It took far too long to work out how to do this on the GitHub help pages...

Using Cobalt with GitHub pages

Sun, 11 Jun 2017 18:29:09 +0100

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 GitHub page, must have the content in the master branch. Repository/Project GitHub pages can live in a subdir of default branch i.e. docs

MacBook Air Setup

Sun, 04 Jun 2017 16:49:09 +0100

Here's my current setup for my MacBook Air Setup. I use a range of tools like homebrew, Visual Studio Code and vim.

Code generation scripts in PL/SQL

Wed, 10 May 2017 16:49:09 +0100