This year, I really wanted to work on my output, and I think I’m doing pretty well. Here are some things that I’ve been publishing:
Regular monthly blog posts on yakushima.blog A few posts this year on the Geolonia blog for work However, updates on this personal blog has been not so great – the previous post is the “2023 review” post, after all.
I’ve been updating this blog from 2012, when we officially incorporated Flagship.
I’m currently working on migrating a Rails application to ECS at work. The current system uses a heavily customized Capistrano setup that’s showing its signs, especially when deploying to more than 10 instances at once.
While patiently waiting for EKS, I decided to use ECS over manage my own Kubernetes cluster on AWS using something like kops. I was initially planning on using Lambda to create the required task definitions and update ECS services, but native CodePipeline deploy support for ECS was announced right before I started planning the project, which greatly simplified the deploy step.
A few years ago when I was doing client work, we would regularly host clients’ sites and apps for them. During this time, I was responsible for both development and keeping them up and running as much as possible. Most of the money being in new development, it was difficult to assign priority to improving the operations of existing applications. In this period, I wanted an “operations person” to teach me how to make new applications that would need minimal operations support from the beginning.
We use fluentd to process and route log events from our various applications. It’s simple, safe, and flexible. With at-least-once delivery by default, log events are buffered at every step before they’re sent off to the various storage backends. However, there are some caveats with using Elasticsearch as a backend.
Currently, our setup looks something like this:
The general flow of data is from the application, to the fluentd aggregators, then to the backends – mainly Elasticsearch and S3.
I recently started using Ubuntu Linux on my main development machine. That means that my PostgreSQL database is running under Ubuntu, as well. I’ve written guides to upgrading PostgreSQL using Homebrew in the past, but the upgrade process under Ubuntu was much smoother.
These steps are assuming that you use Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, and PostgreSQL 9.6 is already installed via apt.
Stop the postgresql service.
$ sudo service postgresql stop Move the newly-created PostgreSQL 9.
Here are the headline features of Sierra, and my thoughts about them.
Siri Don’t use it on the phone, won’t use it on the Mac. It would be nice if I could use it by typing, though.
Universal Clipboard This seems like a massive security risk. It works via iCloud, so if someone (like my daughter) is using my iPad, then it will sync the clipboard to that, too. How do I turn it off?
I stumbled upon Convox a couple weeks ago, and found it pretty interesting. It’s led by a few people formerly from Heroku, and it certainly feels like it. A simple command-line interface to manage your applications on AWS, with almost no AWS-specific configuration required.
An example of how simple it is to deploy a new application:
$ cd ~/my-new-application $ convox apps create $ convox apps info Name my-new-application Status creating Release (none) Processes (none) Endpoints $ convox deploy Deploying my-new-application Creating tarball.
Elixir’s Getting Started guides go over the &Module.function/arity and &(...) anonymous function shorthand, but there are a couple neat tricks that are not immediately apparent about this shorthand.
For example, you can do something like &"...".
iex> hello_fun = &"Hello, #{&1}" iex> hello_fun.("Keita") "Hello, Keita" Let’s have some more fun.
iex> fun = &~r/hello #{&1}/ iex> fun.("world") ~r/hello world/ iex> fun = &~w(hello #{&1}) iex> fun.("world") ["hello", "world"] iex> fun.("world moon mars") ["hello", "world", "moon", "mars"] iex> fun = &if(&1, do: "ok", else: "not ok") iex> fun.
In the beginning of 2015, I wrote a blog post about how my then-current programming language of choice (Ruby) was showing itself to not be as future-proof as I would have liked it to be.
A lot has changed since then, but a lot has remained the same.
First: I have started a few open-source Elixir projects:
Exfile -- a file upload handling, persistence, and processing library. Extracted from an image upload service I’m working on (also in Elixir).
I attended my first Elixir-related meetup yesterday, tokyo.ex #1.
(If the slides don’t work here, I have also uploaded them to YouTube.)
In my 5-minute lightning talk, I talked about the basics of using Exfile. Exfile is a file upload persistence and processing library for Elixir with integrations for Ecto and Phoenix.
I’m a big Let’s Encrypt fan. They provide free SSL certificates for your web servers so you can protect the traffic from prying eyes. In fact, the connection between your web browser and my blog server is made private thanks to Let’s Encrypt.
Using Let’s Encrypt requires some setup and automation on your part if you want to use it in the AWS cloud, but AWS recently launched something called the AWS Certificate Manager or “ACM”.
