Josh Barratt's Blog

A really, really big list of books I’ve heard of from friends, social media/booktok, jumped out at me at a bookstore, or came to me in a very vivid dream.

Current gear and hacks to make car camping simple, fun, and comfortable

A collection of practices and ideas for organizing technical teams around their work.

A previous post looked at using Lambda, API Gateway+Websockets and DynamoDB for multiplayer gaming.

Docker makes it easy to not just get started running a minecraft server, but to run all kinds of different servers, backups to the cloud, and more.

My favorite things to do with the Oculus Quest (and Quest 2), after having it for 2 years – and some thoughts about the future of VR

A quick guide to setting up Prometheus for monitoring your home.

A simple end to end demonstration of building a multiplayer brower-based game with a Javascript frontend, API Gateway’s support for serverless websockets, Go code running in Lambdas, DynamoDB for storing state, and SAM for managing the infrastructure.

A STEAM night at our elementary school was just the reason I needed to finally decide to get a pen plotter, the perfect combination of Technology, Engineering, Art and Math.

When communicating about technical systems, diagrams are one of the most powerful tools in your toolbox.

Setting up a custom new tab page for your browser is a great way to make your most frequently accessed pages, and useful contextual information, a simple click away.

Sequence Diagrams and Flowcharts are very useful tools.

The Sensibo Sky improved the temperature control in my office, and almost worked the way I wanted.

Envoy is a powerful cloud infrastructure tool, and it’s very extensible via gRPC sidecars.

This post provides an overview of a method I’m calling ‘The Magic Box’ – a thinking tool to help understand true system requirements, and help drive better system design and better documentation.

AWS recently released ARM-core based servers.

S3 and Cloudfront make a great combination for sharing assets.

I used Go to generate a custom SendGrid-themed sticker for my MacBook.

Using Go to build out an embeddable and high performance Oracle of Bacon

This is a crazy thought experiment – what if you embedded a database inside a lambda function?

Using Pinboard bookmarks to populate a Feed Reader, Overengineering Edition

In most modern organizations, essential logs will be sent to an internal or hosted log management service.

When trying to make scalable computer systems, it’s almost impossible to fully simulate all the ways things can break.

Visualizing weeks with a Grid Heat Map I’ve often been a part of, or responsible for some kind of 24x7 team coverage, or an application or platform’s performance which needs to be solid 24x7.

As previously discussed, this site is now being built with Hugo.

In the design of my site, I decided to put a small block at the bottom of each page with links to the most 5 recent posts.

As part of my recent Move to Hugo I wrote a few small tools that may be useful (with tweaking) for someone else doing the same, or moving from a similar static hosting platform.

Well, I have once more decided to switch site creation engines, this time to Hugo.

About me My name is Josh Barratt. serialized.net is my personal blog, which has taken too many forms over the years.

I haven’t needed dynamic DNS service for a while, but I have a new use case that calls for it.

I’m a big fan of the recent rise of “Serverless” computing, spearheaded by AWS’s Lambda.

My favorite small appliance, bar none, is my Electric Pressure Cooker.

I have tried worryingly many methods for tracking my personal and professional projects, some of which I have written about here before.

I previously blogged about being frustrated enough with slow docker stop times that I figured out how to speed them up.

I’ve been working with docker-compose a lot, and it’s a really great tool.

I’ve recently been working on a set of internal tools for automating common processes.

In my role at Media Temple, I end up doing a lot of ad-hoc analysis, looking at things a diverse as how our infrastructures are growing, to changes in the market, to trying to figure out how we can help our customers better, and so on.

One of the things I like most about IPython Notebook is right there in the name – it’s a great notebook.

During a time in my life when I was spending around 3 hours a day in a car, I developed a big appreciation for podcasts.

I’ve recently been using IPython Notebook a lot.

I was invited to speak at the All Things Open 2013 conference in Raleigh, NC, and took the opportunity to talk about a project I’ve been researching and experimenting with a lot recently: Docker.

note The author of Nikola liked this approach enough to integrate it into nikola core, so if you’re running a recent version you can just run nikola auto.

My brother got me a Raspberry Pi for my birthday (thanks!)

note If you are looking for the Octopress to Nikola migration script, Mike McCracken has improved it and moved it to it’s own repository.

I’ve really been enjoying using Ansible for my personal sysadmin tasks.

note Updated 2014-06-09 If you are looking for the Octopress to Nikola migration script, Mike McCracken has improved it and moved it to it’s own repository.

For the last 10 years, there’s been a pretty incredible live comedy show happening in Los Angeles, called Comedy Death-Ray, then Comedy Bang!

Update (2015-06-11): There is now a nice installable package to make this even easier, sphinx-autobuild.

At work we’re working on a new project made up of a number of python packages, but they’re all (for convenience) in the same repo. repo/ package1/ package2/ package3/ These are a group of modules and services which can be consumed by each oth…

The plugin I recently wrote about using Taskwarrior for tracking my tasks.