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Rehosting a Heavily-Used SaaS Search Engine to AWS
How we moved search.usa.gov from a traditional datacenter to Amazon Web Services (AWS), and how that move saved money while improving operational quality
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Maintaining SSL Certificates for a Multi-Tenant SaaS using Let's Encrypt
It's a well-known fact that acquiring SSL certificates can be a difficult process. It's even more difficult to acquire SSL certificates that are valid for an arbitrary list of domains, many of which are controlled by different agencies. This post describes how we use Let's Encrypt to easily keep our SAN SSL certificate up to date with all of the domains of our customers who require HTTPS support in a multi-server environment.
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Making DNSSEC Work for an AWS-Hosted SaaS
Not everything in the Internet clicks together as easily as you might think. This post details the approach that we took to solve the hard problem of securing DNS for our government agency's SaaS servers - as well as their customers' CNAMEs to the SaaS servers - in the AWS environment.
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Using gdb to Inspect a Running Ruby Process and Execute Arbitrary Commands
How Unix utilities helped me dive beneath the covers to spot a problem deep in some Ruby code
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Arriving at a location-independent work arrangement
A discussion about the benefits of a location-independent work environment and how to get there.
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Websockets, Elastic Load Balancers, express-state and jade! Oh my!
Websocket upgrades in the context of AWS Elastic Load Balancers
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Gotchas With Branch-Specific Rails Databases
A demonstration of a problem that can plague projects that use per-branch database names
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Selectively Disabling Rails Asset Compression
Asset compression can break your specs. But disabling it for tests can also mean disabling in production - or having tests that don't reflect production behavior. Here's how to strike a middle ground.
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Non-Destructive Debugging of Chef Recipes
How to debug Chef recipes in an environment where recipe modification isn't possible
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Using strace and lsof to Track Down Process Hangs
Using an old-school tool from the Unix toolbox to find out what's going wrong when a process is inexplicably hung