During the COVID-19 pandemic, schools and daycares have been closed, so my family decided to use this as an opportunity to make some habits to make sure we can get through this period with minimal interruptions to life and work. Here are some habits that have worked so well for us that we’re planning on keeping them, even after the kids go back to school / daycare.
Keeping a schedule
We use a schedule to make sure the time we eat, sleep, and do activities are at regular times every day. At first, I thought this would be a good tool to let the kids know when we were working and when we could play together, but it’s proven to be a useful tool to both adults and children. I’ve written a blog post in Japanese about this as well.
While working on a Ruby project, I often find myself referring to the code of various libraries when it’s easier than looking up the documentation. For this, I used to use code (bundle show GEM_NAME), but recently I’ve been getting this warning:
[DEPRECATED] use `bundle info $GEM_NAME` instead of `bundle show $GEM_NAME`
Okay, that’s fine, but bundle info returns a bunch of stuff that would confuse VS Code:
> bundle info devise
* devise (4.7.1)
Summary: Flexible authentication solution for Rails with Warden
Homepage: https://github.com/plataformatec/devise
Path: /Users/keita/.asdf/installs/ruby/2.7.0/lib/ruby/gems/2.7.0/gems/devise-4.7.1
Luckily there’s bundle info $GEM_NAME --path. code (bundle info devise --path) is kind of long to type out every time, though, so I decided to make an alias.
I’ve written about how to host a single page application (SPA) on AWS using CloudFront and S3 before, using the CloudFront “rewrite not found errors as a 200 response with index.html” trick.
Recently, working on a few serverless apps, I’ve realized that this trick, while quick, isn’t perfect. The specific case where it broke down was when the API is configured as a behavior on CloudFront (I usually scope the API to /api on the same domain as the frontend, so CORS and OPTIONS requests aren’t necessary). If the API returned a 404 Not Found response, CloudFront would rewrite it to 200 OK index.html, and the front-end application would get confused. Unfortunately, CloudFront doesn’t support customized error responses per behavior, so the only way to fix this was to use Lambda@Edge instead.
The bots should announce, “I’m not a person, or if I am, I’m not allowed to act like one.”
Or, if there’s no room or time for that sentence, perhaps a simple bot at the top of the conversation. That way, we can save our human emotions for the humans who will appreciate them.
I’ve been working on setting up autoscaling settings for ECS services recently, and here are a couple notes from managing auto-scaling for ECS services using Terraform.
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. Failing this, I decided to become “the operations person” myself.
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. If a log event warrants a notification, it’s published to a SNS topic, which in turn triggers a Lambda function that sends the notification to Slack.
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?
