"Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe." - Abraham Lincoln.
Best way to contact me is via Twitter or email.
Recent posts
September 15, 2020
A Better Code Review
"Everyone gets the experience. Some get the lesson." T.S. Eliot Contributing to a project is not an easy task, especially if you're new to the project, new to coding in general, or
just not an active contributor. I have been on both sides, the…
August 28, 2019
Levels of Us Vs. Them
I've recently finished reading John C. Maxwell's The 5 Levels of Leadership - an excellent analysis of the levels of leadership, categorized by the manager's influence. Although the author's descriptions and points are mostly spot-on, I've found that…
June 03, 2019
Using Bastion Host to SSH Tunnel to Mongo Replica Set
We have a Mongo Replica set inside a AWS VPC that's inaccessible from the outside world. The common practice
for this is to create a Bastion Host which has a leg in the VPC,
but also an available leg to the outside world (usually over a non-standard…
May 25, 2019
Limitations of Running AWS Lambda Functions Inside VPC
Lambda technology is often decorated with misleading superlatives, such as "unlimited scale" and "no ops". In our data-pipeline project I found that working with AWS Lambda functions at scale, meaning
thousands of concurrent operations a second, and…
March 20, 2019
AWS Kinesis Producer Retry Strategy
Pushing data to AWS Kinesis Data Streams can and does fail, especially if you do not
have enough shards or your shards are not evenly balanced. Under-provisioning will
usually get you the all-dreaded ProvisionedThroughputExceededException. It's…