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Month: June 2017

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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