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Category: Technology

Posts about technical topics.

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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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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Tech lead roles: What makes a technical leader?A tech lead dives in to help the team
Public speaking retrospective, 2016 edition