February 6, 2015 Agile Government Leadership recently posted the Agile Government Handbook. It’s a nice primer to Agile for govvies. It tackles the first issue of describing Agile in the context of government. The post introducing it provides a good background: “One of the recurring issues I heard, from both government employees and contractors, was that there needed to be a basic understanding of what Agile was in the context of government. There is an “Agile divide” between those who fully grok and are practicing it, and those who hear and process it only as a buzzword or passing trend or something unrelated to functions outside of technology project management.

June 18, 2021 I struggled recently getting AWS Gateway to implement query string caching. Here is the order of the steps you need to take: In the API Gateway console, under Resources, navigate to your API method and method. In Method Request, add a new URL Query String parameter checking Required and Caching. Deploy the API (because you always forget!) Under Stages, on the Settings tab, click the Enable API cache API.

April 2, 2021 Every time I look at the Lambda monitoring tab in the AWS Console, one of the charts drives my crazy. AWS has good intentions behind the charts. These charts show the performance of a Lambda, a tiny split-second function. AWS does a decent job of providing monitoring charts to show you the golden signals of your service performance: Traffic is displayed in the Invocations chart showing how many times the lambda was called Latency is displayed in the Duration chart showing how long the lambda took to execute Errors are displayed the Error count and success rate chart.

May 25, 2020 I was recently struggling with getting a CloudWatch alarm on a log filter metric to work. I was refactoring the creation from a CloudFormation template into just Lambda Python code. I was able to get both the filter metric (looking for errors and exceptions in logs) and alarm created. But, when I tested the alarm, it never went into an alarm state, even when then metric filter showed active data. It was driving me crazy.

November 16, 2019 Here is a Cloudformation template snippet to create a CloudTrail that is used to also record data events for Lambda invocations and S3 operations in addition to the typical management events from CloudTrail. CloudTrail: Type: AWS::CloudTrail::Trail DependsOn: - SNSTopicPolicy - S3BucketPolicy Properties: S3BucketName: Ref: S3Bucket SnsTopicName: Fn::GetAtt: - SNSTopic - TopicName IsLogging: true EnableLogFileValidation: true IncludeGlobalServiceEvents: true IsMultiRegionTrail: true EventSelectors: - DataResources: - Type: AWS::Lambda::Function Values: - arn:aws:lambda - DataResources: - Type: AWS::S3::Object Values: - "arn:aws:s3:::"

November 1, 2019 I recently tried to schedule an AWS Lambda defined through a SAM template to run every 10 minutes. I used some online cron expression builders but the syntax would not work with Cloudwatch. Somehow, I missed this reference in the Schedule Expressions for Rules. The online expression builder puts * for both day of the month and day of the week. You cannot use * in both the Day-of-month and Day-of-week fields.

February 17, 2020 I always struggle trying to convert GMT time to EST or EDT especially in 24 hour format. It’s even harder when I’m staring at a log file trying to find the root cause of an issue. I wrote this bash alias to output the last 24 hours of time in both local and GMT. I find I’m using it all of the time now. Since it’s an alias, I can easily run it from a Terminal window or within VSCode.

October 17, 2020 As I hear news stories about COVID-19 trends, I like to look at data to form my own opinion if the narratives are in line with the data. I often want to compare current numbers to the high-water marks for bellweather countries and states. For international COVID data visualizations, my favorite site is Financial Times’ Coronavirus Chart. I like to see the metrics per 1M people so I can compare countries, regardless of their size.

October 11, 2020 I created a Python script to create small multiples of key COVID data from The COVID Tracking Project. It allows me to scan the state data to get a comprehensive view of key metrics. I published the charts on my Covid Small Multiples page.

October 10, 2020 New Cases For Select States All Time Last 90 Days New Cases Hospitalizations Deaths Description These charts show per capita (1M people) data for changes in positive cases, hospitalizations, and deaths sourced from The COVID Tracking Project. The data is shown as small multiples to allow the reader to scan the changes across the states. Per capita numbers are shown to see similar metrics regardless of state population.

October 17, 2020 As I hear news stories about COVID-19 trends, I like to look at data to form my own opinion if the narratives are in line with the data. I often want to compare current numbers to the high-water marks for bellweather countries and states. For international COVID data visualizations, my favorite site is Financial Times’ Coronavirus Chart. I like to see the metrics per 1M people so I can compare countries, regardless of their size.

October 11, 2020 I created a Python script to create small multiples of key COVID data from The COVID Tracking Project. It allows me to scan the state data to get a comprehensive view of key metrics. I published the charts on my Covid Small Multiples page.

October 10, 2020 New Cases For Select States All Time Last 90 Days New Cases Hospitalizations Deaths Description These charts show per capita (1M people) data for changes in positive cases, hospitalizations, and deaths sourced from The COVID Tracking Project. The data is shown as small multiples to allow the reader to scan the changes across the states. Per capita numbers are shown to see similar metrics regardless of state population.

April 2, 2021 Every time I look at the Lambda monitoring tab in the AWS Console, one of the charts drives my crazy. AWS has good intentions behind the charts. These charts show the performance of a Lambda, a tiny split-second function. AWS does a decent job of providing monitoring charts to show you the golden signals of your service performance: Traffic is displayed in the Invocations chart showing how many times the lambda was called Latency is displayed in the Duration chart showing how long the lambda took to execute Errors are displayed the Error count and success rate chart.

April 25, 2015 As we’ve entered spring, my kids have been begging to wear shorts and short-sleeved shirts (their favorite set of clothes). In Virginia, we can still have wide temperature swings from day to day. So, each day they ask if they can wear shorts and I check the temperature. I’ve been having them read the two-digit temperature value and they’ve gotten good at that. But, I wanted a way for them to figure out the type of clothes to wear.

October 22, 2019 I attended the 2019 DevOpsDays Raleigh and really enjoyed it. Here are my take-aways and highlights from my favorite talks. The live-stream video of talks are on the DevOpsDays Raleigh YouTube channel and the individual talk videos should be up by mid-November. 1. General Thoughts Don’t forget culture during your transformation Don’t focus on finding a single root cause for an incident. There’s rarely a single event.

June 15, 2021 Using my git-log-analysis tool, I analyzed a few public repos: elasticsearch forem react-native

October 11, 2020 You can pass a commit hash to checkout to quickly see a previous version of code. I like to commit often as I get new chunks of partial code working. If I advance to the point of breaking everything, it’s an easy way to see what used to work. git checkout <commit hash>

December 16, 2018 In playing with getting git’s credential helper to work on Windows, I accidentally added multiple helpers to my local config file. It took me a while to figure out where it was stored and how to reset it. I used this command when in the local repo directory. git config --unset-all credential.helper This Stack Overflow post got me close but was based on the multiple values coming from different versions of the config file.

April 25, 2015 As we’ve entered spring, my kids have been begging to wear shorts and short-sleeved shirts (their favorite set of clothes). In Virginia, we can still have wide temperature swings from day to day. So, each day they ask if they can wear shorts and I check the temperature. I’ve been having them read the two-digit temperature value and they’ve gotten good at that. But, I wanted a way for them to figure out the type of clothes to wear.

November 25, 2016 Growing up, my dad wouldn’t just answer a question from the kids. He would follow it up with background info, reasons why, and ask us related questions. It always stuck with me and I find myself “dadsplaining” things to my kids. It’s a good, impromptu moment for teaching and getting the kids to think creatively and analytically. I also try to do it with co-workers, but I’m sensitive not to force it on people like I force it on my kids.

June 15, 2021 Using my git-log-analysis tool, I analyzed a few public repos: elasticsearch forem react-native

January 2, 2013 Using my git-log-analysis tool, I analyzed a few public repos: elasticsearch forem react-native

September 8, 2022 Here is map of key cities often heard from the news about Ukraine. The interactive version is in ArcGIS Online.

January 5, 2017 A few months ago, Iris Classon tweeted a picture from Gothenburg, Sweden. Out for a walk. Gothenburg University at 2AM under a full moon. Simply magical. pic.twitter.com/TidOiWdUcw — Iris Classon, #MSBuild Dev MC (@IrisClasson) February 17, 2014 It immediately made me think of one of my toughest clients and why I admired him. He happened to be Swedish and from Gothenburg. I’m finally getting to blog about it now.

November 25, 2016 Growing up, my dad wouldn’t just answer a question from the kids. He would follow it up with background info, reasons why, and ask us related questions. It always stuck with me and I find myself “dadsplaining” things to my kids. It’s a good, impromptu moment for teaching and getting the kids to think creatively and analytically. I also try to do it with co-workers, but I’m sensitive not to force it on people like I force it on my kids.

February 6, 2015 Agile Government Leadership recently posted the Agile Government Handbook. It’s a nice primer to Agile for govvies. It tackles the first issue of describing Agile in the context of government. The post introducing it provides a good background: “One of the recurring issues I heard, from both government employees and contractors, was that there needed to be a basic understanding of what Agile was in the context of government. There is an “Agile divide” between those who fully grok and are practicing it, and those who hear and process it only as a buzzword or passing trend or something unrelated to functions outside of technology project management.