Welcome! on hardwarehacks.org

I like to think I keep on top of Hacker News, and that I’m in the know that the world is on fire before most of my nontechnical peers.

I have a number of tools in my .bashrc file that make my day-to-day activities fast.

In late August of 2022, after two years of remaining relatively healthy, COVID-19 finally caught up with me.

I’ve been helping organize DevOpsDays Boston since 2017.

Several times now, I’ve been presented with provider bugs in Terraform - specifically the AWS provider - that are fixed in PRs that have sat unmerged for months, if not years.

I have a recurring issue where I’ll walk by my shelf of Raspberry Pi’s and knock the cord out of something.

Some time ago, I bought a standalone ATSC tuner so that I could watch TV at my desk, without having to depend on the setup or state of any other “things” on my desk.

Like many, I found myself ending 2020 without having taken any time off.

A friend had his bachelor party in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic.

I hiked Mount Major in Alton, NH in 2019.

I met up with some friends in Chicago back in the summer of 2016.

The Java classpath allows dependencies to be brought in from various locations at runtime.

Note: this blog post is adapted from a talk give at a meeting of the Boston Jenkins Area Meetup on Thursday, April 21st, 2016.

Note: this blog post is adapted from a lightning talk given at a meeting of Boston Devops on Thursday, March 24th, 2016, the slides from which are available.

Let’s Encrypt, the free and automated certificate registrar, by default provides certificates in PEM format.

Some types of Amazon EC2 instances come with multiple instance store volumes - for instance, the c3.xlarge instance type comes with two 40GB SSD volumes.

Introduction Elastic Load Balancers (ELBs) make use of multiple concurrent connections to backend applications to improve throughput, and will also attempt to make use of HTTP keepalives to mitigate reconnection overhead.

Introduction Users of Amazon Web Services can elect to terminate SSL using an Elastic Load Balancer (ELB), rather than at the application level.

I found myself in Erie, PA back in 2015.

An SCM tool such as Git, Mercurial, Subversion, or even the venerable CVS makes it easy to keep a working history of an application.

Introduction A well-behaved application should output reasonably verbose logs.

Introduction A typical Git branching model will somehow link the contents of the ‘master’ branch with released-to-manufacturing code.

I attended the 2014 Chef Community Summit.

I took a weekend vacation to Stowe, Vermont in 2014.