Computer

A cryptocurrency windfall

Bitcoin
© Publicdomainphotos ID 102950205 | Dreamstime Stock Photos

A couple of years ago I was working for a company that allowed me to sit at a desk in their office in midtown Manhattan in lieu of relocating all the way across the country. It was still a kind of shock to adjust to the New York style of life after so many years working for sedate firms in northern New Jersey, with the commute by bus and the walk across Times Square and the standing in line for lunch at one of the dozens upon dozens of eateries within a short distance of the office, and the tech meetups around town. Now that the economy was picking up after the shock of the late 00s there were plenty of exciting things going on in the tech world, many of them right there in the country’s heart of finance. Around then is when I first started hearing about bitcoin when companies like Adafruit and Overstock were beginning to accept this cryptocurrency as payment for their merchandise. People had even written phone apps which allow you to conduct transactions right from your smartphone by then, which sounded both great and worrying considering the rise of mobile phone dependence right around the same time. There were articles describing how blockchain-based currencies could decentralize the global monetary system independent of central banks, and help eliminate middlemen which hinder micropayments. So, I decided I’d take a small amount of money and find out where I could get my own stake in bitcoin.

What I've done

Jelly Boats

Here is a list of what I have put together or worked on for some significant amount over the last couple of years on the job.

  • Monitoring will get its own post eventually.
  • We migrated from a single service which ran on a single instance in Classic EC2 to a half dozen services running in separate VPCs, each with autoscaling instances behind an elastic load balancer to provide high availability. Getting all the plumbing on this right was a major effort.
  • We also shifted our configuration management system from exclusively Puppet at first to Chef, where we could take better advantage of community-written cookbooks, and then brought
  • Wrote an automation script which packaged service config files into a Debian package which would simply be pulled into a new instance like any other versioned package.
  • Worked on a couple iterations of an ELK stack in order to accept logs and structured data
  • Prototyped a stack which used Amazon IoT, Kinesis Firehose, DynamoDB, and S3 to accept mobile data streams and store them for business intelligence. The components were held together with Simple Notification Service and Lambda functions in a serverless fashion.
  • Hacked out numerous one-off scripts in bash and Ruby to automate the recurring maintenance chores in our environments. For instance we needed something to clean up user logins which were not needed any more, scripts to take reference snapshots of volumes for safekeeping, and so on.
  • Worked on some scripts to transfer information from our services to a data warehouse running on Amazon Redshift (so-called ETL scripts) so we would have an analytics service for our own use.
  • Migrated some administrative tools off of dedicated virtual machines onto containers which would run under Rancher. The idea was that we could pack a bunch of light-duty tasks together on a cluster of instances which would run the same workloads with much higher density, reducing costs and maintenance.
  • Wrote a simple Sinatra app which would gather information from our environments (addresses, instance IDs, running state, and so on) and display them in a tabular format. This saved me a lot of time switching between different dashboards and running things through the command line interface just to keep things oriented.
  • Kept track of our hosting costs in order to find out where we could benefit from terminating instances or phasing out legacy services.

Google Chrome Twitter MFA Login Fail

Posting this here in case it saves someone else some time troubleshooting.

I was having lots of problems with Tweetdeck on Windows 10 in Chrome over the last couple of weeks. I hadn’t enabled any new plugins or anything like that, but I was wondering whether the cookies were messing things up, so I logged out, cleared content, and tried logging back in. Surprise, it said my username and password were not recognized. I tried entering this a few times before I remembered that I’d enabled multi-factor authentication security on Twitter a few weeks back, and for some reason it wasn’t prompting me to input the numeric code that was supposed to be texted to my phone. My other devices were working okay. Same thing happened when instead of logging in to Tweetdeck I just tried the main twitter.com site. I started wondering whether the popup alert about MFA was being blocked for some reason in Chrome.