How to protect arbitrary Django model instances.

If you're using Linux, using your own Linux kernel has benefits that might be helpful to you. And once things are set up on your system, keeping up to date is as straightforward as doing a periodic sudo apt upgrade.

IT Risk management is an ever expanding area of interest throughout the software development community. Traditional risk management practices are applied to ensure organizations can withstand unfortunate events like power outages and natural disasters. Additional processes are layered on to deal with events particular to production software systems, such as security vulnerabilities or severe bugs.

Useful things to do with Netcat.

MediaWiki’s API has been around since before REST APIs were commonplace. So it’s a little idiosyncratic, but still useful and flexible.

Editing and formatting text on the web comprises of an interesting sub-field of web development. The web allows for different ways to turn text into HTML markup. First I'll outline some of the background of interactive text formatting on the web from my perspective, and then go into some configuration details of MediaWiki's Visual Editor that I found interesting.

A few tricks for storing configuration secrets in Vault

At the CTL we have about two dozen utility machines spread over 6 physical locations, as well as another three dozen or so staff laptops. Managing updates, user accounts, and printers for all these machines is not only a big job, but also one of many small repetitive steps—which makes it ripe for automation. Having been exposed to DevOps practices at the CTL, I wanted to find a way to corral all these machines in a sustainable way. The plan consists of three ‘legs’: using Deploy Studio to provide the base image, Salt to manage configuration, and Munki to manage applications.

It's extremely helpful to know what's going on with our systems at a glance. One area where we lacked visibility and occasionally ran into conflicts were configuration management runs. We use Salt for our configuration management and orchestration, and here is how we make Salt operations visible to our team in Slack.

The other night I was on a panel discussion on Python Deployment at the Django-NYC meetup. The discussion was very good and I think everyone there got a lot out of it (I did). But the format wasn’t really suitable for going into great detail, showing actual code fragments or demos. I’ve written about aspects of our deployment strategy in the past on my personal blog and in comments on other sites, but it’s a continuing work in progress and I’m well overdue for an update. We also have a web-base deployment tool that, while the code has been open and available for a while, we really haven’t officially announced or publicized until now.