Posted on May 28, 2021
in aws, lambda, cloud
AWS released the ability for Lambda Functions to use containers in December 2020. This opened up a whole set of new use cases for lambda functions, since now we developers have better control of the runtime environment. I’ve found they are a great fit for performing tasks that require elevated privileges, especially if AWS IAM can control access. Running tasks with elevated privileges in an ephemeral manner is great for security, since there’s nothing constantly running with that access.
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Posted on December 23, 2020
in management, leadership
Between June and September, I managed my team while my manager was on parental leave. The summer was mostly quiet, until a reorg happened in August. Three weeks before my manager was schedule to return, another org was folded into ours. For my team, this meant getting one new engineer, additional responsibilities, and an additional headcount. This abruptly changed the pace of my work, which in turn led to some additional lessons.
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Posted on July 30, 2020
in management, leadership
For 3 months of foggy San Francisco summer, I am filling in for most of my managers duties while he takes paternity leave. This post captures some of the lessons I’ve learned in the past that have been useful so far this summer. Many full time managers I know started out in a situation just like this, and somehow made the jump to management full time. I have technically been a manager before, though since I have decided to focus on becoming a higher level technical contributor.
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Posted on January 27, 2018
I switched to VSCode as my primary editor almost a year ago. One of the primary reasons being that I could never get a Node debugger working quite right in Atom. Once I installed VSCode and figured out Launch Configurations it worked perfectly. Most of the tutorials for setting up node apps for debugging in VSCode either assume you are 1. not using nodemon or 2. not using babel. I use both, and want both to be a part of my workflow in addition to being able to use the built-in debugger.
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Posted on November 10, 2017
A few months ago I switched this site over to the static-site generator Hugo from a flat-file CMS. It was great. In half a day I had ported my HTML and CSS to a Hugo theme and setup CircleCI to build and publish to S3. I’ve now started using Hugo for other things, which in some ways stretch the limits of what it can do.
In one project, the content pages have corresponding data files.
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