Late last year I shut down the first full scale project I had built. It was an excellent learning experience (as documented here). I didn't make any money on that project, but the cost of learning was pretty low. A few weeks ago I finished the initial content and made …

Recently I wanted to created a scheduled Lambda event that would send a message to an SQS queue. I ended up using Cloudwatch to trigger a Python based Lambda event that would make a call to the appropriate queue.

This process was pretty easy to set up and required configuration …

Ten months ago I launched remote-first (you can read more about that process here) which was the first paid product I've launched since I started working in IT. In this post I'm going to talk about why I believe it failed, the costs involved in such a failure, and how …

On February first I deployed https://remote-first.com, the first project I've ever released that has a paid component. I feel as though a retrospective to review and document the process and creation of the app will be beneficial for myself, and may benefit others.

To begin the idea at …

Late last week I was investigating some Docker deployment components and how I could integrate them with Salt. Looking on the internet I found a lot of tutorials that talked about different components, but couldn't find anything that included an actual working project that showed how all the components fit …

I decided to play around with Powerline some more after a talk by Corey Quinn at this year's SeaGL conference in Seattle. I quickly learned that setting this up is a real pain in the ass. This is primarily because the documentation is not very good, and the documentation for …

Recently I've been asked a few times about the status of the Salt book that I am writing. People seem pretty eager to get their hands on it, but I've been quite slow to actually write the book. There are multiple reasons for this but primarily it boils down to …

A few weeks ago I wanted to create a script that would automatically download the latest Java RPM from Oracle's site, and update a YUM repository so I wasn't constantly doing it manually.

When I wrote the script there were a few key points it had to hit:

1. It would …

I'll be discussing the setup of the blog with this initial post, the main focus will be on the usage of SaltStack.

Our setup is going to consist of the following:

One Ubuntu droplet from DigitalOcean, or your favorite VPS provider.

Our static blog (Pelican) running through nginx and a …