Blog

Whodunnit

Published: July 2, 2015

When a team of people, both technical and non-technical, collectively operate a shared software installation things are bound to go wrong at some point. As the technical folk we are often engaged to perform forensic analysis. This type of work frequently includes tasks such as grep-ping server access logs for certain request paths, dates, and IP addresses or reviewing any other logs or information related to whatever incident may have occurred.

This post is about a specific incident that came up recently. It was not a major one, but there were some learnings for me along the way and I figured it would be interesting to document the process.

pv: My New Favorite Command

Published: June 30, 2015

I don't know about you, but I'm not a fan of typing a command into the terminal and then nothing happening. Generally, any command that I know might take a while I'll run in verbose mode. That's great, I know that the process really is running. But what I don't know how far along it is...and how much more there is to go.

Today I found out about the pv command. Boy, is that a game changer...

Screenshot Monitoring

Published: May 2, 2015

Sometimes it's helpful to keep a visual record of certain areas of your website.

I'll give you an example. I worked on a Magento site with a long-standing issue where multiple times a day, half of the documents would fall out of the SOLR index. In the end we found the culprit behind this issue, but in the process of debugging and analyzing the issue it was helpful to keep screenshots of certain search terms on record. In this post I'll dive into the details on setting said monitoring up.

Massive Magento Attributes

Published: March 27, 2015

Magento is often criticized for being slow. I won't lie, the first time I used Magento that was my reaction as well. But after more than a year working at a Magento Gold Solution Partner I've learned that with the right hardware, and software, Magento can run rather smoothly...most of the time.

A Workflow That Takes The Pain Out Of (Responsive) HTML Email Development (Using Laravel and Gulp)

Published: February 23, 2015

Most front end developers would probably not list coding HTML emails as one of their favorite activities. From table based layouts, to inline styles, to popular email clients that still use Microsoft Word as a rendering engine it is understandable that HTML email development is generally considered a nightmare. Fortunately, starter templates and build tools make the process a lot less painful. In this post I'll outline a workflow I set up on a recent project that made HTML email development downright fun.

Dealing with WHOIS records

Published: January 4, 2015

Recently I've been working on a side project, Domain Clamp, a web app for monitoring domain and SSL expirations and sending notifications. The most unexpected challenge thus far has been dealing with WHOIS records. While SSL expiraton dates can be retrieved simply by asking the server on which the SSL is installed, there is no way to get a domain expiration date without asking a WHOIS server. And that, my friends, is where the trouble begins...