On DevOps

A 2016 walkthrough of manual domain validation with Certbot and uploading a Let's Encrypt certificate to the IAM store for CloudFront. Today, AWS recommends ACM.

A practical guide to application configuration: keep deploy-specific values out of code, parse and validate configuration at startup, make precedence explicit, and treat secrets as secrets.

A secure connection has many advantages over good old HTTP: protection against traffic interception, protection against content substitution, better search ranking, and so on.

A 2015 installation note for Docker 1.9 and Compose 1.5.1 on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, preserved as historical reference with a link to current installation instructions.

Sharing a local web app with colleagues and clients, as it worked with ngrok 2 in 2015. The original commands are kept for historical context.

A 2015 note on the Docker ambassador pattern: Compose links were one-way, circular links failed, and a proxy container closed the loop. Historical only; modern Compose networks make it unnecessary.

Every developer has tasks that are impossible to be proud of and a little embarrassing to mention, because everything about them is bad.

PHP CLI can read environment variables directly, but PHP-FPM intentionally clears worker environments by default. Here is how to pass only the variables your application actually needs.

There is nothing more convenient than a good command shell, and zsh is probably one of the best.

A PHP container needs a database, an address to reach it, and a reason to believe it is ready. Here is a complete local stack that wires those pieces together.