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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.
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.
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.