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My Hack Day experience with API Gateway and Apache VelocityGateway Arch

My Hack Day experience with API Gateway and Apache Velocity

Published by Martin Smith on June 25, 2017

During my last visit to the Castle, I had the opportunity to join a hack day event with our awesome Solutions Architects at Fanatical Support for AWS at Rackspace. While my team does try to do hack day events every few months, I was excited to join a totally different group with different skillsets and work with them more closely than I had before. I opt’d for the group who wanted to build a specific project (details omitted) using API Gateway, Elasticsearch, Lambda, and Slack.

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3 Thoughts about Santiago, ChileTeleférico Metropolitano

3 Thoughts about Santiago, Chile

Published by Martin Smith on June 15, 2017

A few weeks ago, I went to Santiago de Chile for 2 weeks. I met up with Remote Year friends and worked during the day at Edge Coworking (would recommend!). Overall, it might have been a tactical error to visit such a place in winter; I bet it’s got a totally different vibe in the summer time. However, I’m always saying I want to see more places in their normal mode, so I packed some warm clothes, booked an AirBnb with a host that didn’t speak English, and hopped a direct flight from Atlanta. And all things considered, it was a pretty great trip!

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The Chef Firewall Cookbook: a Leaky Abstraction

The Chef Firewall Cookbook: a Leaky Abstraction

Published by Martin Smith on June 12, 2017

Managing a firewall is hard. Designing an abstraction layer on top of a firewall is even harder. Not only do you need to understand networking and your operating system, but you need to figure out a way to map common operations on firewalls to specific implementation rules. And you’ll need a way to manage firewalls across a fleet of machines. If this sales pitch hasn’t encouraged you to buy a hardware firewall yet… enter the Chef Firewall cookbook.

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How Slack is bad for an online communitySlack message indicator showing multiple people are typing in the app

How Slack is bad for an online community

Published by Martin Smith on May 4, 2017

Dave Cheney recently made waves in the tech world by writing that Slack is inappropriate for open source communications. This reminded me about how the Chef community had made the move to Slack last year, and how they’d identified some major gaps between IRC (the previous preferred chat platform) and Slack. Because you can’t moderate users, block users, or protect your own private messages, I’d recommend communities go elsewhere. I’d take this further and argue that Slack is bad for any kind of non-corporate community.

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3 Thoughts about Machu PicchuMachu Picchu Summit photo

3 Thoughts about Machu Picchu

Published by Martin Smith on May 1, 2017

According to Wikipedia, “Machu Picchu is an Incan citadel set high in the Andes Mountains in Peru, above the Urubamba River valley. Built in the 15th century and later abandoned, it’s renowned for its sophisticated dry-stone walls that fuse huge blocks without the use of mortar, intriguing buildings that play on astronomical alignments and panoramic views. Its exact former use remains a mystery.”

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