22 articles · 2012–2026
Writing
Notes on Go, infrastructure, cloud platforms, distributed systems, and things learned while operating software in production.
2026
2025
2017
Terraform In Production, Lessons Learned
Terraform has a lot of power, but often even heavy users of terraform miss some of the simple things that can make managing infrastructure easier than vendor...
Deploying To A VPS Without The Hassle
It's a question that gets asked with quite a lot of answers, Docker, Ansible, CodeDeploy, Chef, the list goes on. The idea should be simple, taking code from...
Cross Account AWS Lambda Deployments
I recently talked at the Serverless London meetup https://www.meetup.com/Serverless London/events/236664340/ , I was asked about how we do cross AWS account...
2016
What Am I Copy And Pasting Into My Dockerfile
It's pretty common that when you have no idea what you are doing, you want things to "just work". Docker, and by extension, Linux, have a world of documentat...
Go Microservices Without Docker....say Whaaaaaat
Docker is pretty cool, lots of tools, big community and it goes quite nicely with Golang Go microservices. My company, FundApps, is a Fintec startup, we writ...
Deploying Go Microservices With AWS CodeDeploy
We have a familiar story at FundApps https://www.fundapps.co/ , big monolith, trying to break into microservices, same old same old. We have a dotnet stack,...
Cloudformation Updates, What's Happened Since You Started Using Terraform
CloudFormation, the AWS specific infrastructure as code service, I don't use it anymore....but maybe I should. Maybe you should too.
Consul And Service Discovery, How It Can Help
Consul https://www.consul.io/ is a tool I've been using the last few months to get a handle on our expanding platform. Consul is a tool built by Hashicorp to...
Lambda Deploys With Apex
AWS Lambda https://aws.amazon.com/Lambda/details/ has been around for a couple of years, in that time the way in which you create and deploy functions has be...
How To ELB With ALB
Amazon recently announced its new load balancer, the Application Load Balancer ALB https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new aws application load balancer/ . This...
A Month With No Job
Sixteen days ago, I quit my job.
2015
Creating An Alarm Service Using AWS Lambda And Slack
Lambda http://aws.amazon.com/lambda/ by Amazon http://aws.amazon.com/ was a service launched last year and was in preview until a few weeks ago https://aws.a...
Real Time Gatling Results With Docker And Influxdb
Gatling http://gatling.io/ is an open source, Scala based load testing tool. It offers a simple proxy based web recorder for following user journeys, or alte...
2014
Quick Uptime Tests
We had a huge bug on the live site, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news http://www.bbc.co.uk/arabic , the navigation for our Asia edition was broken. Most of the links...
Proxy Auth In Phantomjs
I recently setup a Nginx proxy server on a UK based provider, this is to test UK centric features of the BBC News website. We use AWS for most of our tooling...
2013
Screen Recording In Android
Sometimes you need to show someone something on a phone, words are just not good enough. With testing moving more to mobile, having the ability to show a col...
Game Client Web Browsers
I recently got Battlefield 4, an intensive first person shooter with high detail graphics and enough shooting to satisfy any teenage angst. I purchased the g...
Wraith Opensource
Today we are announcing the release of a front end regression testing tool called Wraith . This tool is something we have been using for the last 6 mon...