I'm a huge fan of GitHub actions and organization level secrets, but you can't see what the current secret is w/i GitHub (w/o deploying a container somewhere with it exported as an ENV var). I tried to keep a copy in my former secret management tool clipperz.is/app but drift is real. It was always too … Continue reading Managing Github Secrets with Vault
Author: Dan Ackerson
Secure GitHub Deployments to Your Home
I'm a cheap bastard when it comes to online services. All my repositories have been publicly hosted on GitHub well before Microsoft swooped in and offered unlimited private repos. Since around 2016, this had been my build/deploy pipeline: You might ask how could that ssh key be comprised. Well, back in the day, CircleCI would … Continue reading Secure GitHub Deployments to Your Home
Write your own Slack chatbot in Golang
Chatbots are all the rage nowadays so I'll show you how to plug one into your own Slack channel. It's easy, fun and, best of all, completely free! I. Preparation Of course, you'll need a Slack team which I'll refer to as yourteam.slack.com throughout this post. The free plan includes up to 10 apps or … Continue reading Write your own Slack chatbot in Golang
Enable Your Teams to Rapidly Ship and Operate Quality Software
How often do your development teams release to production? Who gets the alert in the middle of the night when everything crashes and burns? Do these questions make you uncomfortable or rather their answers? Or maybe you are already discussing changes to your current deploy process? Because it sucks, right? If you're honest, it will … Continue reading Enable Your Teams to Rapidly Ship and Operate Quality Software
Supporting Millions of Pretty URL Rewrites in Nginx with Lua and Redis
About a year ago, I was tasked with greatly expanding our url rewrite capabilities. Our file based, nginx rewrites were becoming a performance bottleneck and we needed to make an architectural leap that would take us to the next level of SEO wizardry. In comparison to the total number of product categories in our database, … Continue reading Supporting Millions of Pretty URL Rewrites in Nginx with Lua and Redis
How Hubot Automation Crystallized Trust within our Development Team
"Hey Dan, could you deploy the coolPics branch to test? Sorry for the bother." "No problem, man. Tell me the SHA and I'll deploy it." I had been having this conversation 4-5 times a day for a couple of weeks now. Being a huge fan of continuous integration, I wondered how to automate this. Why … Continue reading How Hubot Automation Crystallized Trust within our Development Team
If Devs Own Testing, Ops Owns the Environment
The devs are all writing automated tests and some are even experimenting with TDD. Congrats! But what happens when the build server breaks? Who's taking care that Continuous Integration is running smoothly? Seems to be an awful lot of red in there... Unlike writing the first basic tests, CI is hard. Did the test fail … Continue reading If Devs Own Testing, Ops Owns the Environment
Leadership In the Online Age: A Reflection On Team-Building
In the last decade of my career, I've been extremely fortunate to have worked with some of the best people I've ever known. A big contributing factor to this is the tech-savvy, expatriate culture that exists here in Munich as well as the type of people you typically find abroad who have left their home … Continue reading Leadership In the Online Age: A Reflection On Team-Building
Why Teaching Developers To Test Is A Good Investment
Test a developer's software and you'll find bugs. Teach a developer to test and they can release their software. A bit of a twist on the old fish and eating maxim, but the same idea: teaching a skill enables self-reliance and self-confidence. And, while it's harder than quickly doing someone a big favor, teaching is … Continue reading Why Teaching Developers To Test Is A Good Investment
Stop Scaring Your Customers and Speed Up Releases
"But our customers don't want 10 new versions a year. The last release alone had over 600 bugs!" retorts the hotline manager. "How about a small update with just a handful of bugs?" Your big-bang release is scary. It's full of issues and weird, new features that nobody understands. It requires documentation and training and … Continue reading Stop Scaring Your Customers and Speed Up Releases
Agile Web Operations 