On Demand Windows Machine in AWS

A few years back, my wife needed a new Windows machine. I didn’t want to get new hardware, so I convinced her to try out an EC2 instance instead. Instead of an EEEPC with an 8” screen, she got upgraded to a Macbook that would RDP into an EC2 instance. Using a t3.large and an IoT button for powering…

May 03, 2020

Opting in to Preview Builds with AWS ALBs

AWS’s application load balancers support routing traffic to different locations based on HTTP request characteristics. This is helpful if you want to allow users to opt-in to use a new service. Typically I’ve used feature flags to determine if a user should see new features, but feature flags are…

April 27, 2020

AWS IoT EC2 Power Button

I recently bought a Pixelbook, which is great for lots of things, but not coding. I knew this at purchase time, however, so I just planned on SSH’ing wherever I wanted to work. Most of my home projects live on a personal EC2 instance I’ve set up. It lives in an autoscale group whose size is…

August 26, 2018

Packaging dpkg for S3 in 2017

Trying to make a Debian package and host it on S3 is and should be easy. But finding up to date examples and docs hasn’t been. So, to save the next person some effort, here are some tools and ways to go about building your own Debian package, signing it, and hosting it on S3 such that it can be…

December 12, 2017

AWS Lambda Error Handling and Monitoring

This started as a simple “hey here’s how you make Sentry good in Lambda,” and then I just kept going and now it’s how we manage all the things that could go wrong in Lambda in production. I’ve been doing a lot with AWS Lambda lately. Coupling it with AWS’s API Gateway, where I work we’ve built an…

November 30, 2017

AWS IoT Button + Pushover = Extra Laziness

I’ve four kids (and we’re done). My oldest is 9, and my youngest is 2. The oldest always wakes up around 5am, and the toddler wakes up around 6:30. I don’t like waking up at 6:30, and the oldest can now get her out of the crib. So, every morning around 6:30, I hear the two year old start crying and…

May 23, 2016

Using Mina with Atlassian Stash

Internally I’m setting up Atlassian’s Stash, and one of the first projects I wanted to get going was my own projects that were previously hosted on Github. For Rails deployment, I love Mina, so I was hoping it’d be as simple as placing my public key on Stash and changing the repository URL in config…

August 26, 2014

Historical Nest Usage

The Nest app and website give you 10 days of usage information for your thermostat(s). Unfortunately, they offer no way to view data beyond that, which sucks if you want to compare usage month to month, or measure changes longer than 10 days (e.g., “did my solar screens make a difference?”). So, I…

August 26, 2014
© Terry Heath 2020