Category: Technology
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Wildcard Let’s Encrypt Certificates with Certbot and GCP
As of last month (March 8th-ish, 2018), Let’s Encrypt supports wildcard certificates! This is great news, because it means that those of us who like using tons of subdomains can now get one cert for all our subdomains, rather than having to get a cert for every single subdomain. As you may know, Certbot is…
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Building Large Docker Images, Quickly
Sometimes, you've just got a big codebase. Maybe you want to put that codebase into a Docker image. Sure, you could mount it, but sometimes that's either not an option or would be too much trouble. In those cases, it's nice to be able to cram your big 'ole codebase into images quickly. Overview To…
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Alphabetic Filtering with Regex
Last week, I found myself needing to filter things alphabetically, using regex. Basically, this is because PHPUnit lets you filter what tests you run with regex, and we (we being Etsy) have enough tests that we have to split them into many parts to get them to run in a reasonable amount of time. We've…
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Starting up the Blog Again
Hey everyone – I know that very few people are following this, but I wanted to let you all know that I'm going to be posting with a weekly cadence starting again now. The posts will be almost entirely tech-related, since that's what I do now. I've got a couple of posts in the pipeline…
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Anker USB-C to USB A Cable Review
I was recently given a sample of Anker’s new 6ft USB-C to USB A cable (They also come in a 3 foot variant). Actually, I guess I should say that I was given two samples, since they come in a pack. I’ve been using them over the past week and a half, and I’ve got…
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Moving or Distributing Your Docker Build Cache
Recently, I hit an issue where building docker images on containers meant that the Docker cache wasn’t being persisted from one build to the next. So even if you ran an identical build on the next run, it’d still rebuild every step, costing you valuable time. Luckily, it’s not too difficult to save your Docker…
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Using Docker for WordPress Theme & Plugin Development
In the time since I actually learned something about deploying to the web, I’ve been extremely unhappy with my WordPress development workflow. As a result, I haven’t developed any WordPress themes or plugins in quite a few years. I’ve just used themes and plugins as-is, but I’ve finally decided that I want to actually build…
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Running WordPress with TLS/SSL on Apache and Nginx as Reverse Proxy
Getting WordPress running properly on Apache with Nginx running as a reverse proxy is surprisingly difficult. It took me quite awhile to get all the moving parts in order, but it’s great once you get it all done. Plus, it’s really cool to get an A+ rating from SSL Labs: Configuring Nginx for the Switch…
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Open Wi-Fi & Wireless Security
I’ve recently been thinking about Wireless Security, and the way it relates to ‘public access points’. It seems to me that it’s very difficult for us to avoid public networks altogether (whether we’re at a hotel, a coffee shop, or really anywhere else). Sometimes, we really need to connect, even if we have some burning…
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HTTPS for free with Let’s Encrypt
If you’re anything like me, you’ve probably wanted to add HTTPS to your personal sites or apps, without having to shell out the money to get a certificate from a certificate authority. Of course, self-signed certificates were always an option, but it really kind of sucked to have to always either bypass warnings or install…
