Minding the gap between administration and development
Problem Statement If you’ve ever launched an Amazon EC2 instance (aka. virtual machine), you’re probably familiar with the concept of an Amazon Machine Image (AMI). AMIs are simply virtual machine images that you can launch your EC2 instance with. Because anyone can publish a custom AMI, and because AWS has a massive marketplace of vendor-provided … Read more Finding an AWS EC2 AMI with the AWS PowerShell SDK
Although I’m not a user interface designer professionally, I have some rather strong opinions about how user interfaces should be implemented. After all, I use a variety of different software on a daily basis, ranging from Google Chrome, Firefox, Gmail, Google Calendar, Asana, Spotify, and many others. In my mind, user interfaces should be as … Read more Frictionless User Experiences: Add a Command Palette to your React Application
If you’re like me, you try to automate everything, even the small stuff. I have a few Bluetooth devices that I occasionally use with my MacBook Pro: Apple Magic Trackpad 2 Apple Magic Keyboard Bose QuietComfort 35 Sennheiser PXC550 Getting Bluetooth devices powered on and connected isn’t always the easiest process, especially if you have … Read more Control Bluetooth on Apple MacBook Pro from the Command Line
If you’re developing with Python and the Amazon Web Services (AWS) boto3 module, you probably wish you had type hints (aka. auto-complete / Intellisense) in Microsoft Visual Studio Code. Even though the boto3 documentation is exceptionally good, it’s annoying to constantly have to switch back and forth between it and your editor. More context switching … Read more Enable Intellisense for AWS Boto3 Type Hints in Microsoft Visual Studio Code
You can use the AWS PowerShell module to create DynamoDB tables. If you need help setting up the AWS PowerShell module, start by watching this video. There’s a helper function called New-DDBSchema, which creates a .NET TableSchema object. Start by assigning the output from this command to a variable; you can name the variable whatever … Read more Create AWS DynamoDB Tables with PowerShell
Amazon Web Services (AWS) provides some built-in parameters in the AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store service, which expose pointers to the latest version of Amazon Machine Images (AMI) for Windows Server and Amazon Linux. These special parameters are called “public parameters” in the Parameter Store services; for more information, check out the official documentation. In … Read more Finding Windows and Amazon Linux AMIs with PowerShell
While developing a CloudFormation template recently, I received a variety of different error messages from the AWS CloudFormation service. These errors predominantly were centered around the AWS Systems Manager service, which enables you to perform automation tasks. One such automation task that I wanted to perform was to deploy a shell script to an Amazon … Read more Errors and Fixes using AWS CloudFormation to Deploy Shell Scripts via AWS Systems Manager Associations
Although it may seem like the Get-Random command in PowerShell provides random data, it actually returns data that is more predictable than you think. If you’re looking to generate some truly “interesting” data for your project, then you’ll want a better approach. In this video, we’ll explore the limited randomness of the Get-Random command, using … Read more [Video] Improving Randomness in the Get-Random PowerShell Command
I am running Ubuntu Linux virtual machines on VMware ESXi (vSphere Hypervisor), and needed a mechanism to add SCSI disks to VMs without having to reboot. After adding the disk in VMware ESXi, the disk still wasn’t visible to the guest operating system. It seemed like I needed some mechanism to force Linux to rescan … Read more Rescan SCSI Controller on Linux to Detect New Disks
This morning, I ran into a new issue doing a simple git clone command on Windows 10, from a PowerShell console. It turns out that it was just a mistake on my part (surprise, right?). Let me describe my train of thought to you. I wanted to clone a repository, so I ran this command. … Read more Fixing a git clone error: protocol error: bad line length character: logi