Q4 Hackathon Theme: Machine Learning & Data Science
I was dusting off my copy of Ray Kurzweil's The Age of Spiritual Machines today, and found a fascinating chart (adapted below). The book was written in 1998; it's interesting to reflect nearly 20 years later we're more or less on schedule. $1000 will buy you an electronic brain with a "thinking" capacity somewhere between a mouse and human.
October 21, 2017
Origin Protection with AWS WAF & Shield
Amazon has been steadily improving their CloudFront CDN offering with WAF (Web Application Firewall) capabilities. This is a great feature, however it's ineffective if origin servers can be attacked directly, bypassing CloudFront. With a little extra work, access to the origin can be restricted.
The solution is to add a secret header value at the edge, and configure the load balancer to block requests that are missing this secret. This is necessary because CloudFront distributions are not…
October 12, 2017
Drupal 8: Migrating data from JSON files
The beauty of Drupal 8's built-in Migrate module is its flexibility. Lots of people will likely use it to migrate their Drupal 6 or 7 sites, but that's not all it can do. In fact, it's capable of migrating data from just about any data source PHP can read.
The first few times I used Migrate in Drupal 8, I was migrating data from a MySQL database into Drupal. See my previous posts about the topic here.
October 9, 2017
Maximizing the Value of a Small Team by Maturing Processes and Technology
One of the things that I do is help companies and business people implement a people, process, and technology golden triangle so that there is a solid foundation for growth, maturation and scalability in their organization. Though this is a complicated process, my role in this is to maximize the efficiency of these three things. You could be using the wrong technology, have too much technology, or not have enough. You could have a heavy process that burdens people or not enough process that…
September 28, 2017
BackstopJS Part Deux: Javascript Config and Makefile
I’ve written previously about my setup for BackstopJS (which I’m still excited to say is the creator-recommended tutorial for V2 of the package!). Since that article, I’ve switched from JSON to Javascript configuration, and added a Makefile as the main method of running visual regression tests with BackstopJS.
September 11, 2017
Comparing Drupal, Symfony, and Craft CMS Frameworks
With so many options available out there, it can be confusing to choose the right CMS for your business. When a client came to us with a recommendation from their design partner to build their solution in CraftCMS, we had to pause for a moment. Would CraftCMS be robust enough for their needs? Would it allow for growth and future proofing that they wanted? We took it upon ourselves to assess the strengths and capabilities of three notable CMS frameworks to help our client in their decision…
August 28, 2017
Using Serverless Config to Deploy an AWS CloudWatch Dashboard
My team’s most recent project has been really interesting - it’s a JavaScript project that includes using the Serverless Framework to deploy a variety of AWS Lambda Functions (e.g. uploading to S3 buckets and making requests to the API that we built). Part of my responsibility as QA Engineer was to set up a CloudWatch dashboard in AWS. Dashboards can be created manually in the CloudWatch service, but I wanted to create the dashboards through code deploys.
August 26, 2017
Is your company going to be digital or not?
A month after opening our 2nd office and meeting with people in Los Angeles, CA, one thing is very clear: companies know they need to move into the digital world, and they know they need help getting there.
August 17, 2017
DevOpsDays PDX
Last week, I attended my first DevOpsDays PDX! I wasn’t quite sure what to expect, but it seemed like a cool conference - DevOps obviously intersects with QA work, and my interest has been peaked by articles I’ve read from the likes of New Relic, Julia Evans, and Etsy.
August 10, 2017