Blog

  • I received positive feedback on my AWS Lambda presentation in London. This post discusses how to package and deploy your lambda function. I’m sure there are other ways but I wanted something simple. This allows me to maintain separate enviroments (i.e “dev”, “production”). Makefile I use Make to create a package (i.e “sample-app.zip”). The dependencies…

  • This post discusses one way we monitor our background process – which is different than how we monitor our web services. It’s difficult when you can’t send a request/poll the service. I wanted something more than checking if the process is alive. One solution we came up with is is using syslog with a log…

  • I was standing outside the car, wiping the dogs’s feet when I overheard a voice. “Are you a young lady or a man?” Did I hear him right? I continued wiping my dogs’s feet and responded: “Well, HER name is Metric. And SHE’S a German Shepherd.” I wanted to make it clear that that we…

  • Last night, I presented (deckslide here) on AWS Lambda at DevOps London Exchange. I really enjoy public speaking, but it wasn’t always that way. In fact, I used to hate it – feared it. I vividly remember an embarassing instance in high school Spanish. My classmate and I had to do a presentation. I got…

  • I’m writing a python library (speedcurve.py). At work, we’re using SpeedCurve to track our web performance. SpeedCurve’schangelog reveals can trigger a deployment (and a series of tests). I’m replacing our curl+ansible commands with this. I plan on integrating this with slack as well. This project is heavily influenced by github3.py. I’ve been contributing frequently (plan…

  • I came across this license issue while searching on GitHub. So, I thought I’d give it a shot. I pinged sigmavirus24 in #github3.py seeing if this was a feature I could implement. He gave the thumbs up and I was off. Testing manually first Before any implementation, I always like to get a better understanding…

  • I’ve always been scared of open sourcing, despite wanting to get involved for a long time? Why? For a long time, I’ve programmed in isolation. But, I did enjoy it. Unfortunately, this leaves little (to none) opportunity for feedback and critism. Afraid of rejection? Afraid of not appearing as smart as I think I am…

  • I was getting so frustrated. I knew how to raise the exception with side_effect=. But, how do you mock the exception? try: connection = connect_to_sqs except BotoServerError as m: if m.error_code == “AlreadyExistsException” To get it to work, I inherited the exception class – BotoServerError from boto.exceptions import BotoServerError class MockBotoServerError(BotoServerError): def __init__(self, error_code) self.error_code…