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• What I'm Reading This Week - April 13, 2018 April 13, 2018 • Aaron S. West

  I spent a lot of time this week reading about how different engineering teams have scaled their Hadoop infrastructure. I also spent time looking at consistent hashing strategies, how GitHub manages DNS and routing, and how individual personalities affect team culture and performance. Read on for all the details.

• Automating Text Messages with Tasker November 20, 2015 • Aaron S. West

  My wife likes to know when I’m going to be home after work. She often makes dinner for the whole family or the kids need something from me or she simply wants to know when her relief is going to arrive.

• GitHub Announces Universal 2nd Factor Support October 02, 2015 • Aaron S. West

  I’ve written about getting started with YubiKey and using a YubiKey to authenticate with GitHub in the past few months. Yesterday, GitHub announced support for Universal 2nd Factor (U2F) and specifically, support for YubiKey devices. You can read GitHub’s announcement here and Yubico’s coverage.

• YubiKey and GitHub Two-factor Authentication September 04, 2015 • Aaron S. West

  I was able to get my YubiKey Edge working with GitHub Two-factor Authentication recently. On github.com I went through the two-factor setup and selected the authentication app option. When I got to the screen with the QR code I launched the YubiKey Authenticator app on Mac OS X Yosemite (10.10.x) and plugged in my YubiKey Edge. I then chose the File -> Add option in the menubar. I actually had to click back and forth between the YubiKey Authenticator icon in the Dock and any other app icon in order to get the YubiKey Authenticator menu to show in the menubar on OS X. Once it was displayed I could click File -> Add.

• What's This Engineering Notebook All About? August 17, 2015 • Aaron S. West

  From May 5, 2002 through March 29, 2014 I blogged at trajiklyhip.com and later aaronwest.net/blog. I wrote 599 posts during this timeframe mostly on programming in Flash, Flex, and ColdFusion. Each post received, on average, 8,053 views. My most viewed post was on installing ColdFusion 9 on CentOS Linux. That post garnered 197,856 views. Total views on the blog to date are 4,823,875.

• Better Documentation Using Conventional-Changelog August 03, 2015 • Aaron S. West

  One of the things I’ve been playing with at work is conventional-changelog and the concept of generating a CHANGELOG.md for most projects. We’ve double-downed our effort to create more and better documentation and as part of the effort I researched ways to generate documentation automatically and have said documentation be as close to the code as possible.

• Exporting and Importing GitHub Labels July 30, 2015 • Aaron S. West

  At work we’re in the process of migrating all of our code repositories from Bitbucket to GitHub. Our main driver for this change, and something I should probably write about here, is integrating all of our project management and process orchestration in one tool. This brings our issue management, project planning, state visualization, and more into the tool we use to manage code.

• How to Background Linux Console Processes July 26, 2015 • Aaron S. West

  This week our data team were talking about ways to run a Python script without having the execution attached to your console session. There’s more than way one to accomplish this but here’s the one they settled on.

• How to Retrieve Your Wi-Fi Password on Mac July 23, 2015 • Aaron S. West

  I don’t generally forget the password for Wi-Fi networks I use, mainly because I use 1Password to store all secrets. But, I ran across the ability to retrieve the password, in plain text, from the OS X Keychain of an SSID I’ve previously connected with. Not a huge amount of utility to this but it’s interesting the capability exists.

• Getting Started with YubiKey July 21, 2015 • Aaron S. West

  About a week ago I purchased a YubiKey Edge, a USB security device from Yubico. The company makes several editions of the YubiKey each designed to add security to your interactions on the Internet. The most common use case of the device is functioning as a hardware component in two-factor authentication. Yubico calls this 2FA while others, such as Google, refer to it as 2-step verification. In either case the point is for the end user to supply something they know in conjunction with something they physically have in order to authenticate with an endpoint online.

• Flushing DNS Cache on Mac OS X July 20, 2015 • Aaron S. West

  Below are the various Bash commands needed to flush DNS on Mac OS X. There are several different versions of the commands depending on which version of OS X in use. Ensure you are selecting the command appropriate for your OS. HT to OSXDaily for additional explanations on what is happening under the covers.

• Generating SSH Keys on Mac OS X July 19, 2015 • Aaron S. West

  Generating an SSH key without a password. For example, for passphraseless old school Hadoop clusters. This is generally done from within a users home directory such as /Users/username on Mac.

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