Writings from a Philadelphia Software Engineer…
So I’m a huge fan of the service NodePing. NodePing is a service used to monitor websites and service availability, and can ping hosts, monitor HTTP/HTTPS, other services like POP3/IMAP, DNS, and more! It can also perform “advanced HTTP” monitoring and check the HTTP response code or the content from the response! I pretty much …
Continue reading “Using NodePing To Send Downtime Notifications To Slack”
So Linode has gotten onto the IPv6 bandwagon. In addition to each Linode getting an IPv6 address, they will also gladly assign an entire /64 netblock to your specific node on request. That gives you all sorts of flexibility for bringing up IPv6 services. And this blog post is going to be all about how to make use of …
So, you want to start a furry convention! Great! We’ll never say no to a new event. And this is a topic I happen to know a little about, as I’ve been staffing/running conventions for nearly 30 years now. (I’m old) Let’s start with a few questions I’d like to throw out, the sort of …
Welcome to my website and blog! It has been been around in one form or another for well over a decade. It’s changed purposes a few times, and at this point is now a mostly tech blog where I share things I’ve learned or made. Feel free to have a look around, or consider checking …
If you’re like me, you write a fair bit of a code, which means you have to interact with many Git repositories. If you’re also like me, chances are you have them in a directory called development/ or similar. It might even have some nested directories, something like this: So that’s cool, but let’s say …
Continue reading “Saving and Restoring Your development/ Directory”
In a previous post, I talked about using NodePing to send downtime notifications to Slack and having those alerts go to your phone. In this post, I’m going to cover a similar concept: using Slack to track one or more RSS feeds and get alerts when a new item is posted to a feed. To …
I’ve written about Docker before, as I am a big fan of it. And for this post, I’m going to talk about some practical situations in which I’ve used Docker in real life, both for testing and software development! But first, let’s recap what Docker IS and IS NOT: Docker containers DO spin up quickly …
One of my activities outside of the office consists of staffing furry conventions. One of those conventions is Anthrocon, a furry convention held in downtown Pittsburgh every June/July. At that particular convention, I manage the website and their social media properties. Yesterday, we opened general hotel reservations, and that resulted in a huge rush of …
I’m a big fan of the Discord Musicbot, and run it on some Discord servers that I admin. Wanting to run it on a server, I first created an Ansible playbook and launched a server on Digital Ocean. But after a few months, I noticed that the server was sitting over 90% idle. Surely there had to be a better …
Continue reading “Dockerizing Discord’s Music Bot in Amazon ECS”
With the release of SEPTA’s new app, I’ve suddenly been flooded with questions about their API. People wanted to know how stable it was. Well, I don’t work for SEPTA, which means I don’t have insight into their operations, but I can perform some analytics based on what I have, which is approximately 18 months of …