Community Posts

I’ve been doing IaC in AWS for years now, primarily through Cloudformation and scripting languages like powershell and python. IaC is great, but these tools have some short comings like yaml being very verbose, and the powershell AWS SDKs not handling idem potency for you. Because of those short comings, I was very excited when AWS released AWS CDK a little over a year ago now. It cuts down on a lot of copying and pasting yaml files like you do in cloudformation, and gives you easier access to higher level language constructs like loops and if statements. Read more → about Tips and tricks for getting started in CDK (a.k.a. IaC is great! Daheck is typescript?)

In the past year I left my position as a Web Developer to work as a Software Developer. Not only did I leave web development behind, the core languages I use every day changed. I switched from a primarily PHP/Javascript developer to a Python/C++ developer. Changing a tech stacks created a need for me to learn a lot about a new language very quickly, I’ve decided to write down some of what I learned. Read more → about Learning a New Programming Language

Eleven kids, ten meet-ups, one shorted board, a dozen blown LEDs, zero burnt finger, one story on KDLT, and two months of fun & creativity. That sums up our fourth Hack Sioux Falls project hosted by Code Bootcamp School. When I first launched this project last year, I had no idea what to expect orRead more Read more → about Hack Sioux Falls Final Projects (Fall 2019)

Node.js is on the rise in the IBM i ecosystem. People are taking notice, but there is still a misconception among some that Node.js and other open source software are difficult to install on IBM i. This article aims to show just how easy peasy it is to get Node.js installed, configured, and running fine on IBM i. Prerequisite This article assumes that you have yum installed and accessible on your IBM i instance. Read more → about Node.js on IBM i: Easy Peasy

As a developer, I want to keep my code as DRY as is feasible for the given project. In a Hugo project, that’s where the Partial templates come in. Partials are smaller, context-aware components in your list and page templates that can be used economically to keep your templating DRY. Partials, however, have one serious limitation, they’re cached during the build of a given page (or scope). Once a partial has been created, no outside logic can adjust what the partial returns (for the page). Read more → about How to Pass Variables to a Partial Template in Hugo

It’s really easy to to set up a website on AWS’s s3 service, but if you want to use a certificate (you do), it’s just a bit more work. With Ansible as my hammer, everything is a nail. Here’s a quick playbook I used to set up my site jxn.is to use cloudfront. This playbook creates the bucket, sets up an s3 website in the bucket, creates a cloudfront distribution with reasonable parameters, enables an existing Certificate Manager certificate on the site, and points DNS records at the cloudfront distribution. Read more → about Hosting Hugo on Aws Cloudfront and Route53 Using Ansible

I’m a big fan of AWS’s SDK’s and API tools because they’re so comprehensive and easy to use, in general, but I sometimes forget that there’s another good, even simpler API for getting data from some AWS resources… the magical http://169.254.169.254/ http endpoint! This endpoint provides read-only metadata about resources once you have access, and doesn’t require additional authentication. This is very handy, for instance, when a client gives me SSH or RDP access to an EC2 instance and I need to know its size, network info, or in this case what Availability Zone it is in: Read more → about Getting Ec2 Instance Availability Zone With Curl or Powershell

Making sure webistes are accessible is a big deal these days. Websites should be mindful of their audience to make sure people with disabilities are not excluded from the site content. Color contrasts between foregrounds and backgrounds is an easy miss when checking that a site is accessible, but one that is vital to hard of sight users. Read more → about Contrast Ratio Calculator

I’ve been pretty heavily reorganizing and simplifying my life lately, so it was time to replace the tired old Wordpress blog at ShellRunner with something more deserving. Wordpress has been a great platform over the years, but as a constant target of attacks, it could also be a pain to keep up. Also, it’s much more fun to write my posts in Markdown, instead of in a browser editor. This is post #1 trying out Hugo, a fast static generator written in Go with a lot of features. Read more → about Trying Out Hugo

Due to community feedback about the install process and usage of my IBM i Dotfiles, I have decided to create a command line interface (CLI) and an RPM to install the aforementioned CLI. Welcome the IBM i CLI RPM and SoBored RPM Repo. This was also an experiment for myself to learn how to build RPMs and host an RPM repo. I have a feeling that I’ll be adding more RPMs over time. Read more → about IBM i Dotfiles CLI RPM & SoBored RPM Repo