Bootstrapping I’ve had to setup 3 different macbooks from scratch recently, and it made me think of the whole process of Macbook bootstrapping. It’s something I’ve done a fair few times over the years, either because I’ve change jobs, get a new personal Macbook or, as is the case recently, had to nuke a work laptop back to factory settings and start again after a buyback program. It lead me to think about my experience with developer bootstrapping in the OSX world, and realising it’s now been over a decade of experiencing the aches and pains and eventual improvements to this experience. I thought I’d do a small braindump of my experiences and the various tools we used and what I use now. ...

I’ve blogged previously about my tinkering with my own Terraform provider for fetching external IPs One of the more fiddly parts I found when using a custom provider is how to use it with the rest of your Terraform code. You could either bundle it with terraform-bundle, or add it as git submodules to the repo you run your code in. Neither are particularly ideal, as you’re either having to create a new bundle every time a new release occurs or have to wrangle with git submodules and increase the site of your code repository by containing binaries. ...

It’s been a bit of a crazy year so far. With social distancing and working from home, I havent traveled a lot or done much interesting tech stuff recently, but I’ve had the itch to do some blogging. So lets do some food blogging! It started with this great first-person cooking video that came up in my Youtube feed: I’ve been following Kenji for a while, from his time at Serious Eats. He explains recipes really well, as well as being a genuine guy and great at explaining things. ...

Vault Caching with Auto-Auth and Puppet So I’ve done a lot of work with Vault and Puppet and how they integrate with each other. I was recenlty posed the question: How would these Puppet runs calling out for secrets affect the performance of Vault, and if it was possible to cache the results? So I did a little digging and the answer is Yes, it’s possible! Vault Caching In the 1.1.0 release of Vault, we added the ability to run vault agent as a caching proxy. ...

S3 Download Progress Bar in Golang Through a series of yak-shaves, I ended up needing to be able to do an S3 download on a machine without python on it, so I couldn’t install the AWS CLI. However, it could run a pre-compiled binary of something, which is easy to generate in Golang. I was still tinkering around with Cobra and CLI apps, so I thought… how hard can it be? ...