If you're a seasoned server administrator then this post will boring beyond oblivion to you; the ingredients: a headless server (no screen, keyboard)years of personal backups on a linux software RAIDa botched system upgradehappy ending The pretext Several years ago I bought an HP Proliant microserver on discount and set up a NAS with Ubuntu … Continue reading A crazy server recovery
Author: george georgovassilis
AWS diaries: serving HTML from lambda
AWS lambda is a neat feature that runs code in response to requests and transforms the code's output into some response. Requests can be an event occurring in the AWS platform such as an S3 modification or an HTTP request. The response is an MVC-style model which needs to pass through some network component, like … Continue reading AWS diaries: serving HTML from lambda
Goodhart’s law
Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes. Goodhart's law (source Wikipedia) Or, in other words, once you tell people "improve that KPI or else", that KPI will be abused to the point of becoming useless: the KPI will improve, but the overall quality/speed/cost (pick a … Continue reading Goodhart’s law
How to improve conversion rates
I watched Kevin Hale's presentation [1] "how to improve conversion rates" (with your UI) and liked his get-to-the-point style. I highly recommend watching the video and am summarizing the content here. I omitted a few parts of Hale's talk (eg. knowledge point and one push button) which, while encyclopedic and interesting, imho didn't advance the … Continue reading How to improve conversion rates
Azure diaries: can’t access KeyVault
Context: as a tenant administrator you can't inspect KeyVault contents created by other people ("you are unauthorized to view these contents"). Solution: assign yourself appropriate permissions like this: Locate the KeyVault in the Azure portal: go to "Access policies"click "+Add Access Policy"Key permissions: everything under "Key Management Operations" and "Cryptographic Operations"Accordingly for key and certificate … Continue reading Azure diaries: can’t access KeyVault
Digitalisation vs. Automation: it is about capabilities
A pre-digital organisation focuses on efficient processes implementation; a digital organisation focuses on capabilities.
Tests are not just about testing
Tests in the context of software development have a surprisingly broad field of uses which exceeds "just" testing. Those further uses paint a more colourful picture of tests than just regression keepers. Tests as a component runtime: a test is the workbench on which the component is developed. Instead of constantly restarting an application server … Continue reading Tests are not just about testing
Error handling for failed network requests with service workers
Most service worker code samples show only the happy path where the fetched resource will eventually be available, eg: self.addEventListener('fetch', event => { // Skip cross-origin requests, like those for Google Analytics. if (event.request.url.startsWith(self.location.origin)) { event.respondWith( caches.match(event.request).then(cachedResponse => { if (cachedResponse) { return cachedResponse; } return caches.open(RUNTIME).then(cache => { return fetch(event.request).then(response => { // Put … Continue reading Error handling for failed network requests with service workers
Case study: scalable, extensible identity provider
Slides for a scalable, robust OIDC identity provider with an extensible architecture.
The Model-View-Presenter-Controller pattern
In this post I'll talk about the MVPC (Model-View-Presenter-Controller) design pattern I use in client applications such as progressive web apps and mobile clients. It can be best understood as an evolution of the MVC (model-view-controller) pattern past the MVP (model-view-presenter) pattern. The basics: MVC and MVP You might want to skip this section if … Continue reading The Model-View-Presenter-Controller pattern
