Using the popular Traefik edge router, we can enable HTTPS / TLS termination on our local docker containers
If you’re not running your production web traffic through HTTPS, you’re clearly doing something wrong.
Everyone runs their production applications through HTTPS and TLS. Most browsers won’t even let you navigate to a website without these.
Security matters, after all. Would you trust a website which wasn’t running HTTPS?
It used to be setting up and configuring HTTPS was like a journey into Dante’s Inferno. Each machine had to be painstakingly installed with and then configured to use certificates, which was a logistical nightmare if you had a fleet of servers.
Those days, clearly, are long gone.
In many cases…
The AWS Multiform Auth CLI you need in your life
Configuring the AWS CLI is easy peasy
If you or your company are using AWS for cloud services, you clearly are using the AWS
AWS cli. If you’re not, well you should be.
AWS makes it easy enough to authenticate your account with the cli no matter which operating system you use.
In effect, you have one or more profiles configured on your local workstation which have all the details needed to access your AWS account. …
Working backwards is the perfect strategy for planning your technology end state
The (less-than-stellar) State of Things
When I was told I’d be in charge of creating our organisation’s tech roadmap, I was decidedly hesitant. With dozens of interconnected systems, lots of legacy code and infrastructure (some of it frighteningly brittle), plenty of tech debt of every sort, and a lot of people saying what is wrong but no clear answers on how to fix it, it was looking like a Herculean task to create a tech roadmap which could encompass it all, let alone get buy-in for the plan.
I’d be lying if I said I’d not been thinking about a tech roadmap for a number…
The road to successful software is paved in thousands of little improvements
How many times has this happened to you?
A fellow engineer kicks you and your teammates a Git pull request. Opening it up, you see that the pull request is as long and convoluted as a Russian novel. Hundreds of file changes across every slice of the application. Repository refactors, business logic changes in half a dozen app services, namespace moves, files reorganised into new directories. None of them appear to be necessarily related, just things changed in bulk, a cacophony of code rework all conflated under a single feature branch. …
How my life in the punk / messenger scene of 90s San Francisco paved the way for a tale of humanity’s digital addiction
“We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold.”
— Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Hunter S. Thompson
(While reading this, you might want to go crank up any/all of the following: Flowers by the Door, by TSOL. In the Flat Field, by Bauhaus. Frank’s Wild Years, by Tom Waits. Cherub, by the Butthole Surfers. Where Eagles Dare, by the Misfits. Shut the Door, by Fugazi. The Merry-Go-Round Broke Down, by Jimmie Lunceford Orchestra. And especially Gnossienne 1 and 3 by Erik Satie. If you can manage to crank them…
Focus on the Big Picture and Leave the Details to Those Who Know Better
They were debating which UI testing framework we’d use going forward. There were testers and developers talking about our uptake of React in our application (replacing crufty old asp.net MVC3), when the subject came up of which testing framework was better. This one does this; that one does that. This one is better for devs; that one is better for testers. There’s more of a learning curve on this one, but that one is not quite as well documented.
On and on it went.
I let them talk themselves out.
In the end, they looked at me for my two…
Getting to know the Buddhist idea of “No-Self”
Me.
What is that? What makes me Me? I mean as distinct from everything which isn’t Me. That bay tree, that panda bear, You. What separates Me from everything else?
Where do I leave off and everything which isn’t Me pick up?
Maybe you’ve pondered this, maybe you’ve not. A lot of us take the self for granted. Not that we take ourselves for granted (though this does happen as well), but the fact that we are firmly distinct, unique things which have a boundary between what is “Me” and what is “Everything Else”.
Let’s challenge that preconception.
Waking up to…
Celebrating the weirdos and the misfits of this world
So here we are. The day has come that my novel finally goes out to the world. Without hyperbole, I can tell you that it feels like this day would never, ever arrive.
Ever.
Five years I’ve worked on Screens. Five long years as I’ve chiseled the stone, polished it nigh endless times until the final edits were made, the last change was complete.
And yet at long last it’s done. Check it.
I feel this sense of overwhelming exhaustion, the writer’s equivalent of crossing the finish line of a marathon. …
A Brief History of the Devil
“We have never heard the devil’s side of the story, God wrote all the book.”
― Anatole France
Much to the chagrin of the Almighty and the Angelic Host, the Devil has never managed to go out of style.
Quite the contrary, actually. The Evil One has managed to maintain popularity as a character even in an increasingly secular world. One need not look far in terms of popular culture across the ages to see the Devil comes back again and again as a fictional character.
Some might argue this is a Bad Sign, an ill omen of the faithless…
Lovecraftian fiction is invariably the tale of someone who’s gone ‘too far’
On the Center and the Periphery
Joseph Campbell once said that most of us stay comfortably at the centre of human society and consciousness, with only scientists, philosophers, and artists willing to stray to the outer edge.
It’s true, of course. Most people do tend to stay closer to shore. People by and large approach anything out on the fringe with mincing, timid steps. New foods, new music, new art, new ideas: these are the things which the mainstream shuns, or at the very least, patently ignores. New is different; it’s uncomfortable and painfully unfamiliar. …
Christopher Laine
Author, programmer, would-be philosopher. Author of Screens https://christopherlaine.net/screens
