Month: January 2014

Mapping Domain Names with name.com, Elastic Beanstalk, Elastic Load Balancer and AWS Route 53

I finally wrapped up my name server and DNS mapping needs with Name.com, Route 53 and Elastic Beanstalk. Since this was a little confusing I thought a short write up was in order. Thanks to Evan @evandbrown for helping out!

The first thing needed is a delegation set of name servers for your DNS and name server provider. These can be found by creating a hosted zone. The way to do this is open up the AWS Management Console and navigate into the Route 53 management area. The Route 53 icon is under the Compute & Networking section on the management console.

Beanstalk, Route 53 - Click for full size image
Beanstalk, Route 53 – Click for full size image

Upon navigating to the Route 53 console area click on the Create Hosted Zones button.

Create Hosted Zone
Create Hosted Zone – Click for full size image

When the zone is created then the delegation set can be found under the Hosted Zone Details. This delegation set now needs setup as the name servers for whoever, in this case name.com, is the domain provider.

Delegation Set - Click for full size image.
Delegation Set – Click for full size image.

Open up the management console for the name server administration.

…

Upon adding them the list should look something like this.

Name servers list built from the delegation set of the hosted zone. Click for full size image.
Name servers list built from the delegation set of the hosted zone. Click for full size image.

Once the name servers are setup, those will need time to propagate. Likely this could take a good solid chunk of time, somewhere in the hours range likely, and don’t be surprised if it takes a little bit more than a day.

While the propagation starts navigate back to the AWS Management Console and open up the EC2 section of the console. On the right hand side of the Resources list there is a Load Balancers section. Click it.

Load Balancers - Click for full size image.
Load Balancers – Click for full size image.

In this section there is a listing of all load balancers that have been created manually or by Elastic Beanstalk.

Load Balancers - Click for full size image.
Load Balancers – Click for full size image.

Make note of the Load Balancer Name for selection in Route 53. This is what Route 53 needs in order to point an alias at for incoming traffic to that particular Elastic Beanstalk application. In this particular image above there are 4 load balancers listed, the easiest way to prevent confusion is to take note of the load balancer name at the time of creation, but this is the easiest way to find them otherwise.

Record Set - Click for full size image
Record Set – Click for full size image

Now when going back to the hosted zone to set it up with the appropriate information, create a new record with the appropriate name, in this case I was setting up the admin.deconstructed.io (no it isn’t live yet, I just set it up to test it out) to point to an alias target. Just leave the Type set to A – IPv4 address and click the radio control so that Alias is set to Yes. In the alias target select the appropriate load balancer for the Elastic Beanstalk (or whatever it points to) application.

That’s it, give it a few hours (or a day) and eventually the domain or subdomain will be pointed appropriately at the Elastic Beanstalk load balanced application.

9 Ways To Survive The Shit Storm of Developer Evangelism

I started to write a blog entry a few months ago about my time doing developer evangelism. First in practice, along with product management and team leadership and then as a full time developer evangelist with Basho. Then I felt many different things, nothing which translated into a very useful blog entry. Well past any motivation to write up where and what I was doing at the time and why I decided it wasn’t something I wanted to keep pursuing, I ran into this blog entry titled “Developer Evangelism The Whole Story“. At that point I thought, “alright, I’m going to add my two cents after all”.

For one of the same reasons Keith Casey wrote his entry. People have asked me numerous times about becoming an evangelist or advocate. Be sure to read Casey’s write up, and here’s mine to throw more into that fire.

Positives:

  • You’ll be able to go to all sorts of cities and meet a whole bunch of different people.
  • You’ll be on display and actually able to do something to improve the industry. Not just technologically but to help resolve sexism, discrimination and other issues and treat people well.
  • Do right by people as an evangelist and you’re set for a plethora of possibilities when you finally get burned out.
  • You get to play with all sorts of tech.
  • You get to travel a lot, which makes you really start to respect your home base, wherever that may be.

Negatives:

  • You’re barely ever home, usually you’re on the road with familiarity often becoming the stink of a plane or the confused expression as the TSA security circus actually recognizes you and just starts ignoring you.
  • Even though you can help improve the industry, you’re ability to make a home, make a difference where you live is dramatically reduced to basically nothing. For most people, considering civic involvement in the United States, this probably doesn’t even matter. For some, it’s destructively depressing.
  • If you get mis-portrayed, say something dumb out of jest, or the media mis-quotes you it can be anywhere from annoying to career limiting or ending. If you make the mistake of pissing of someone that has a lot of pull then it could also be super destructive – even if that person is a total jack ass and everyone routinely knows it and admits to it.
  • You get to play with all sorts of tech, but you lose a lot of credibility because you don’t actually build anything real anymore. This is a huge problem, and I’d even suggest most evangelists go work on an actual dev team every other year or so. It doesn’t matter who you are, you will start to be perceived as a shill of some sort by a reasonable amount of people, even though they could be extremely wrong in that perception.
  • Your home base, you often don’t get to have a real home base. You are a vagabond. For a musical definition, listen to Metallica’s “Wherever I May Roam”.

Now if you still think this is a great gig for you. Thicken up that skin, get some callouses and get ready for a bad ass trip that’ll teach you about all sorts of human interactions and more. But be prepared and keep a solid look out for burn out and the degradation of any of the situations mentioned above. If you do you’ll likely do well. If you’re still interested, here’s a few things to get your kick start in developer evangelism:

  1. Get a social media presence, get it fast, and get a nick that you can use in almost all contexts. Don’t even pretend you can skip this step. The most successful evangelists have a huge social media presence and manage it. They manage it hard core, work it into a system, and learn efficient and positive ways to interact with that social media presence. Shut up, don’t even try to skip it, just go out there and manage it.
  2. Make sure to spend at least an hour a day doing something technical. Hacking on Docker, writing some scripts or heaven forbid writing some actual code. This is massively important because you’ll find yourself losing direction all the time from the task switching and not getting to do these little technical things that will help you keep your edge.
  3. Learn to speak. I don’t mean read a little book and think you know how to speak in front of a crowd. Likely, you really suck at it. I’m talking about practicing in the mirror, talk to yourself, record yourself and watch it and do all of these things without becoming nihilistic or pompous. Most of us tech speakers are so bad we’re lucky that the people in the industry are actually focused on the tech and not our stuttering horror of speaking abilities.
  4. Drop all fear to speak with people in positions of power. Remember, everybody is human, don’t get intimidated and don’t intimidate.
  5. Not that anybody in the software industry or tech industry or any industry needs told this but I’ll say it. Don’t overdo the drink. We’re all dangerously close all the time to being worthless drunkards. Some of us stay pretty functional on a drink or two, but that only lasts for a short time before you do indeed go downhill. Don’t deny yourself, you are NOT part of the one percent that can stay sharp and rot your brain. So keep the drink in check.
  6. Find a way, anyway, to stay physically healthy. If you don’t the travel can very likely kill you. I don’t mean like “I’m tired and want to go to bed” killed but more like “hmmm, Tory Joe McQuerty here sure did see like they were fine, too bad we’re putting them six feet under” killed. Oh, the “I’m tired and want to go to bed” will happen all the time too, just make sure you keep that as the only killed you get.
  7. Attain a huge amount of apathy for the extra overdose of everyone’s opinions about how everything sucks in the world. Many programmers are notoriously negative, especially if they work in the enterprise. It’s part of the daily war story if you get sucked in. Remember to stay focused on what’s important, your health and your loved ones, the job comes second. Anybody that tells you different, put them in that apathy category.
  8. Never feel like you have to explain yourself when you need to take some family time or personal time. Just say you need to and do it. Even if you’re pretty close to people on your team, they need to respect that and let you get some time in. This is extremely important.
  9. Don’t give to many fucks. Learn that at some point you gotta call it a day and turn in. Just drop it all and get a good night of sleep.

Summary: Think really hard about what you want when signing up for a dev evangelist or advocacy gig. It will wreck hell on your life, but it could be immensely rewarding too. But please, if you go into evangelism, practice at it and be prepared. I hate the idea of seeing more people burn themselves right out of the industry.

If you have anymore survival suggestions, please do comment!

Docker Course, Ubuntu, WordPress, Angular.js, Notes, Rich Hickey, Datomic…

Updates, updates, updates…

Docker Course @ Pluralsight

I added a new course on Docker to my Pluralsight list of courses today. This joins my one other course on Riak, which I’m aiming to have more added to that list in the future! Check those out and let me know what you think, how I could improve, what I did right and what you learned (or already knew). I’d greatly appreciate it!

Rich Hickey, Datomic, Clojure, Angular.js and Notes

I started a section on the blog here for notes on topics I’m studying. The first two I’ve hit on are Angular.js and Rich Hickey, Clojure and Hammock Driven Development. I’ll be adding to these over time and will likely report whenever I add good chunks of info or helpful tutorials, how-to docs or just whatever I deem worth mentioning. Simply put I won’t broadcast it much, unless I add some real goodies that are worth it.  😉

Ubuntu & WordPress

I needed a kind of WordPress Workstation to hack around testing some WordPress so I put together quick notes on the fastest and cleanest way to setup a WordPress VM from scratch.

Until later, happy coding, have a metal \m/ \m/ Friday!

Sexism, Racism and t-shirts… Why Stop There?

I attend a lot of technical conferences, hackathons, workshops and all sorts of events where I get loaded up with t-shirts. Ridiculous amounts of t-shirts. Generally I love this! I have had a basic standard about all of these t-shirts. If it is a company and product that I know has done well by its users, by the community and the people involved have tried to do good by what they’re advocating, I’ll wear the t-shirt. Thus, I have a lot of tech t-shirts to wear.

However…

American Apparel is one of the top suppliers of t-shirts for tech companies to print their stuff on and bring to trade shows, hackathons or wherever they’re going. American Apparel definitely has some positive attributes, here’s a list:

  • the products for the USA are made in the USA.
  • the workers make almost 2x as much as other factory workers in the surrounding areas (Los Angeles)
  • paid time off
  • sick leave
  • health care
  • company-subsidized lunches
  • bus passes
  • free English as an additional language classes
  • on-site massage therapists
  • free bicycles
  • on-site bike mechanics
  • free parking
  • proper lighting and ventilation

Now some of these things, many, to the tech industry seem like a joke. But these are very serious benefits for labor. In general, American Apparel does good by it’s employees. At least, in the United States.

The Problems

In China they do not hold these same standards, they hold the standards of labor practices in China for Chinese Factories. These are, dramatically lower than standards in factories in the United States. The conditions there are harsh, but there is no shortage of labor and it is considered an honor to get work. It’s a perverse irony, but it exists.

Then there is the problem that American Apparel has with sexism. There ads have obvious double standards in so many places. In England they’ve actually managed to get some ads banned. That’s an accomplishment since the English and Europeans are often far more liberal about things than US Citizens are. Namely, we as a population in the US are prudes by comparison, so if it got banned in England, holy moly I’m sure it would have raised absolute hell in the United States.

So on Twitter Red Hat evangelist @TheSteve0 posted this tweet.

Pointing to an article on the double standards of American Apparel. I’m all about stepping back and buying product, that has all the above positives in the company and has higher integrity in marketing than American Apparel, but what are the choices? That’s where another tweet a few minute later rallying several other fellow technical evangelists to stop using American Apparel as the top t-shirt.

More Thoughts

This leads me to another thought too, why hand out throwaway t-shirts in the first place? Why hand out anything that’s throw away? Why not hold ourselves to even higher standards? Why not only give away things that people will keep and really use. I can’t imagine how many t-shirts people take and then throw away. We as an industry should absolutely do better.

Some of the things that @thoward37 and I often do is haul excess cloths down to the local Goodwill or Homeless Shelter. Notice how cold it is right now in parts of the country? People are dying (nope, not exaggerating) right now from the cold. Because they don’t have blankets, shelter space and other simple amenities. The least we as an industry could do is provide our excess to those most in need so they can at least stay alive!

Solutions (These are NSFW)

  • Organize efforts at conferences to call-out companies that are being sexist, racist or otherwise discriminatory. Do it was a conference, as a group, as a whole and make it count. Our industry actually gives a shit and we can make things happen. Don’t pretend we can’t.
  • Pull your head out of your ass if you think that buying t-shirts from some sweat shop from X company is a good idea. Do better, if your company doesn’t have the money to buy good product, the DON’T BUY PRODUCT.
  • When you provide swag or whatever to conference goers, treat the conference attendees with respect and actually get them something they can use, that they’ll be happy to say, “yeah, I got this at X conference, it so rocked in so many ways!”
  • Think outside the box, do we really need another thousand t-shirts floating around? If we do have them floating around are you really going to be able to give them away? To people that will wear them? Just think about these things a little. Every single technical evangelist I know is smart enough this takes about 2 seconds. So just spend that 2 seconds and help out.
  • Also, there are more and more women getting involved in tech, in spite of the trolls that waste so much of all our time. Think about this when you’re ordering products, don’t just get a bunch of giant t-shirts. Sure, get some, but realize the community is quickly diversifying and many if not most of the community that is stepping up to take leadership of the tech industry is not going to be one size fits all anymore. (thank goodness)
  • Last one is simple. Just stop and think about what would matter to people. What do you want to give to others that would actually matter. I mean, it really boils down to basic GOOD, high integrity marketing. Don’t treat people like shit, treat them like they’re important. They’re prospective customers, they pay money and put food on your table. So just simply, easily, give a shit.  🙂

On this same topic, I’ll have another post soon about what you’d like to see at Node PDX for swag. What in general would you find to be excellent swag to receive at a conference that you’d be proud to lug home and wear, use or otherwise not throw it away? Until then, please comment and we’ll get some round table conversation going.

Cheers & happy hacking!

Plotting Good Things in Portland :: pdxbridge.js / WTF Databases /

Several people got together yesterday to start planning things for 2014 in PDX. It ranged from coding workshops to PDX Node to Node PDX to what kind of food to eat at for lunch. Ya know, daily tactical things that come along with the big picture items. 😉

bridge.js badge.
bridge.js badge.

Two things that I want to bring up to the community out there. One is a workshop that I’ll likely lead efforts to organize and the other is something I’ll just call pdxbridge.js for now. The workshop will cover the topics of which and what databases to use for what data and how to implement. The pdxbridge.js project is about determining the raised or lowered state of the bridges here in Portland.

Some of the other projects, workshops and other topics we discussed included getting a workshop put together around unit, integration and testing code from a behavioral, test driven development or other approaches. This workshop we don’t have anyone to teach, but we’d (ok, so I really really would love to attend a workshop on this) really like to find somebody who would be willing to teach a workshop of this sort, with a focus on Javascript as the language. On that same topic however, if you’re into Java, Erlang, Scala, Haskell or others and would like to teach a TDD, BDD or related testing workshop please get in touch with me. We will work on making that happen! Ping me at adron at composite code dot com. 😉

Workshop: Intro to Databases & Data

(Relational, Key/Value, Distributed, Graph, Event Series, etc.)

This is a course I’ll lead and others will work with me on to put something extra useful together. We will then teach the workshop as a group, kind of a team paired programming teaching workshop. If there is anything in particular that you’d like to learn about, any questions that you have about data and usage in applications or otherwise add your two cents on this blog entries comments. Over the next month we’ll be putting together the material and have the course available sometime early this year. So if you’d like to attend, jump in at any time with the conversation or just keep a read here and I’ll have more information about the course as we get it put together.

Let’s Make pdxbridge.js Happen!

The pdxbridge.js project is all about determining if a bridge in Portland is up or down. Right now there are  several bridges that matter, that are on this list;

If we add other information to track about the bridges we might add the other 3 that exist and the new bridge that is being built. however the five listed are the only bridges that have a raised and lowered state, and in one case the Steel Bridge has a lowered, partially raised and fully raised state. As shown on the pdxbridge.js badge I threw together (shown above).

To get involved with pdxbridge.js go add your input on this issue I started to discuss our first meet, plan and hack.