Recent Posts

The Move to Jekyll

March 4, 2017 - Categories: IT/Software Projects,How-to Guides

6 minute read

WordPress has served me well over the years, but it’s time for me to move on. My blog first started with Wordpress.com hosting, but I didn’t like that I was hosting WP’s ads,  a custom domain was an up-charge, and they limit which themes and plugins I could use. So I migrated to a self-hosted WordPress instance, allowing me to serve Google ads, add membership functionality, and allow people to subscribe to my site by email.

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Removing Secrets from GitHub

February 16, 2017 - Categories: How-to Guides

4 minute read

Is it secret?! Is it safe?!


What to do when you’ve committed keys, secrets, passwords, and/or other sensitive information to GitHub or any public Git repo

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YouPassButter Slack Bot, Part 2

February 4, 2017 - Categories: IT/Software Projects,How-to Guides

11 minute read

In part 2, we add dynamic meme generation, OAuth configuration, and re-structure our API to support more Slash commands.

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YouPassButter Slack Bot, Part 1

January 7, 2017 - Categories: IT/Software Projects,How-to Guides

6 minute read

A dirt simple Slack bot primer, using Ruby, Sinatra, Heroku, and Slash commands

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Issues with AWS CodeDeploy and CIS hardening

October 22, 2015 - Categories: How-to Guides

2 minute read

I've been using AWS CodeDeploy for some time now and it's really an awesome service. If you're hosting your application in AWS and not using CodeDeploy you're missing out.

If you want to use CodeDeploy yet but you just don't know how, check out my in-depth AWS CodeDeploy course.

I had been successfully using CodeDeploy for an app at work for a few months when I was told we had to switch to using Linux AMI's that were 'hardened' to meet CIS benchmarks for security. No problem right? I redeployed the app stack with the CIS-hardened AMI and worked through a few bugs that came out of it.

However, when I went tried to execute my CodeDeploy deployment it died with an error claiming that it couldn't access the "patch.sh" file due to permissions. I logged on to the instance, cd'd into the CodeDeploy directory, and didn't notice anything obviously wrong with the permissions.

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