There’s often a deadline sitting between pragmatism and perfection in a code base and during an exploration of Pythons pytest extensions and plugins I found a couple of exemplary examples of straddling that line. The two modules Flaky, and the more subtly named, pytest-rerunfailures each help blur the lines a little by allowing you to rerun failing tests and often take the “two out of three approach” to handling troublesome tests. Read on →

I recently took the opportunity to heavily over engineer what should have been about 15 lines of python into a docker based microservice called humanised-jobname. I had a small application that I wanted to add Docker-esque memorable names to and over the course of a few lunch breaks I essentially built an entire repository around the equivalent to 12 lines of code from the Moby container name generator. And I enjoyed every minute of it. Read on →

Not a single piece of the Internets infrastructure seems to stand still for long anymore and after a lunchtime discussion about a HTTP header I’d never heard of, Permissions-Policy, I thought it was time to do a brief refresher on the current recommendations. Rather than looking through the recent specs and RFCs I decided to make it a little more entertaining and try to improve my SecurityHeaders.io grade. SecurityHeaders is an awesome site that checks HTTP headers and reports on any important ones that are missing. Read on →

Summer is in the air and it seems like time to replace my entire home lab monitoring system once more. Sensu has been plodding along nicely but I’m in this for the learnin’ so I’m looking for something more interesting that a major version bump and move to Golang. I’m thinking of giving Prometheus a spin to see how it’s changed over the last few years and as a first step I decided it was time to upgrade my local test bed Docker Compose Prometheus and add some bells and whistles. Read on →

I’ve been a big theoretical fan of Honeycomb.io for a long time now. The technology seems both timely and needed. The employees are prominent in our field and the people that start using it seem to very quickly become convinced of its worth. What’s made it theoretical for me is that I’ve just not had a reason to actually delve into it and have a play around. Or I hadn’t until I saw Observability in the SSC: Seeing Into Your Build System. Read on →

A few years ago CloudFormation was a large part of my day. While Terraform slowly began to creep into my stacks, with its daring support for other providers, one of the features I always missed was an equivalent to CloudFormations AWS specific parameter types. These provided a great way to ensure you were using the type of value you thought you were, enforcing that something was actually a subnet ID for example, and now with Terraform 0. Read on →

I recently migrated this blog from a very old version of hugo to a much newer one and while diffing the output I noticed I’d very nearly hit a blog post milestone. With the publication of this little exercise in vanity I’ve posted 900 articles to UnixDaemon. I’ve had the domain for nearly 20 years now and it has been one of the best investments of my career. It started as a place to centralise little projects and provide links to my code on Freshmeat, Sourceforge and CPAN. Read on →

I’ve been using Trello boards for some of my basic task tracking for quite a while and as other people in my family have seen it in action, mostly via my huge TODO and BLOCKED columns, we’ve begun to use it in a more shared and collaborative way. In addition to the core usage of adhoc task tracking the more frequent use cases we’ve adopted are adding a set of cards on either a semi- periodic basis or a group of tasks when a certain event happens. Read on →

A project to modernise an old Terraform code base came across my desk recently and while investigating the more recent developments in testing tools and workflows I stumbled onto conftest, a utility to help you write tests against structured configuration data. I was interested in trying the technology out but I don’t want to put something i have this little experience in on the main flow of work so I decided to do a few tests with it against a smaller, more self contained, use case. Read on →

After seeing DNSTwist mentioned in a twitter thread recently I’ve been having far more fun than appropriate using it to investigate domain name typo squatting. Typo squatting is when you mistype a domain name or URL and someone has registered a very similar domain in order to capture that traffic and often do unpleasant things with it. A benign example of this is GutHib, a common typo for GitHub that just helps people along with a subtle indication of the error. Read on →