ruby
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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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Rewriting Ruby’s #pack and #unpack Methods in Crystal
In Ruby, especially while writing low-level protocols, you may have encountered Array#pack() and/or String#unpack(). If you’ve ever experimented with them, they may seem mysterious; they take a cryptic string as a parameter (maybe something like C4 or w*) and seem to return gibberish (or, conversely,…
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Redis, Ruby, and Some Surprising Uses
Any developer worth their salt knows that Redis is great for caching. As an in-memory cache, it gets the job done. You certainly don’t have to take my word for it; the major sponsors of Redis (redislabs) wrote a white paper to explain it. What…
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Skull Island: A CLI and SDK for Kong
I’ve been working on an open-source project for managing the Kong API Gateway, both as an SDK and as a CLI tool using a straightforward, YAML-based templated configuration. The project is called Skull Island and is available on RubyGems via skull_island, on DockerHub via jgnagy/skull_island,…
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Updating GoDaddy DNS Entries with Ruby
I bought a new (arguably better) domain for my blog now! If you’re reading this, you’ve probably noticed, but it is therubyist.org, because I’m a fan of Ruby. The old name won’t be going anywhere, at least for the time being. Given the purchase of…
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Distributing CLI Tools via Docker
Throughout my career, I’ve seen a couple recurring patterns related to the tools I write: I write a lot of small CLI tools and I like to share them with my coworkers (and whenever possible, the rest of the world). This has led to several…
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Check for locked out Active Directory user via Ruby
At work, I’ve been working on a lot of automation lately and I ran into a seemingly simple problem that ended up being a bit more complicated than I had first imagined. I have been collaborating on a project that we’re using for auditing Active…
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Reusable CloudFormation Snippets with ERB
Amazon’s CloudFormation is a wonderful and flexible tool for provisioning and managing resources in an EC2 VPC. It really takes the concept of infrastructure-as-code and helps make it a reality. For all its flexibility though, it sacrifices intuitiveness and ease. It is also limited by…