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Three Months at Shopify
I just recently hit the three-month mark in my new position at Shopify. It has been an amazing experience, for sure. While I’ve definitely had other jobs that I enjoyed, I’ve never worked anywhere quite like Shopify or on my team. I’m working with some…
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My Thoughts on Meetings
Meetings can take up a lot of time and cost companies a fair amount of money. They often distract from real work, and fill up our day. When we have too many of them, it is difficult to remain enthusiastic about participating. Here, I’ll provide…
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Solving Scrabble with Crystal
I recently solved a problem I’ve always wanted to solve: writing a library that can unscramble words. I know, this is a pretty geeky and pointless endeavor. Geeky, though, is what I do. Originally, the library focused on exact matches. Given some string, I could…
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Cert Manager, NAT Loopback, and CoreDNS
I recently ran into an interesting issue with my home Kubernetes environment that runs my blog. As I mentioned in a previous post, I run my blog on k3s and I use cert-manager to manage my SSL certificates provided by Let’s Encrypt. Let’s say that…
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How the Internet Works
One of my favorite questions to ask (or be asked) during an interview is the classic “how does the Internet work?” question. It usually goes something like this: You open your favorite web browser, type in “www.mysite.com”, and hit return. Almost like magic, a fully-rendered…
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Kubernetes Node Affinity and EBS Volumes
Occasionally, Kubernetes workloads require specialized nodes. Sometimes it’s for machine learning, or to save money through burstable node types, or maybe just to lock certain Pods to a dedicated subset of nodes. Thankfully, Kubernetes offers a few useful mechanisms to inform the scheduler how we’d…
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RSpec Testing for Ruby AWS Lambda Functions
Recently, I wrote an AWS Lambda function at work in Ruby but I didn’t have a handy tool for creating a project skeleton like bundle gem does. That means nothing bootstrapped my testing for me. While copy+pasting code into pry proved that my simple function…
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Meet Bullion, An ACMEv2 Certificate Authority
I’m a huge fan of Let’s Encrypt and what they’ve done to secure the Internet. They’ve made safe communication free and open. Through their ACME protocol (and subsequent ACMEv2 protocol), they have changed PKI and the way we look at automating certificate provisioning for good.…
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Rationality and COVID-19
The world is pretty crazy right now. COVID-19 has caused the closure of countless businesses and slowed down in-person business for most others (though there is a glimmer of hope as small business and schools are looking at reopening in some respect). Many, many people…
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Connected: A Ruby Graph Search Library
A common problem posed in coding competitions and undergraduate computer science classes is implementing an algorithm for finding the shortest path through a series of interconnected nodes. It can be phrased in many ways, mostly because graph theory (which is the domain of this particular…
My musings on technology, science, math, and more