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Technology

Broadly defined "technology" e.g. software, water pumps

My tour of service with the Colorado Digital Service

I had a genuinely fantastic time working at the Colorado Digital Service for the past 9 months. They are hiring more folks for a variety of technical roles. It’s a great fit for digital project folks with “T-Shaped” experience, e.g., deep experience in building APIs, but a breadth of experience across the entire range of skills required to ship and maintain a digital product. One of their goals is to bring in folks who might not otherwise work for the government. Part of that is the commitment to terms of 6 months to 2 years.

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Turning an AWS Transcribe JSON file into a more useful doc

A colleague recently needed to transcribe some recorded interviews. They used AWS Transcribe which outputs a json file that is not super easy to use directly. Luckily a few open source tools have popped up to make them more generally legible. I helped to turn the results into a docx and wanted to document the process for my colleague and anyone else interested in the process.

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Hiring from Denver Coding Bootcamps - 2019

I've had some friends and acquaintances inquire about the idea of "code bootcamps" in Denver. I'm vaguely aware of them, but haven't really looked at them too closely. I've had some great experiences working with graduates of a bootcamp program in LA and wanted to review the Denver options to see what's available and how to hire from them.

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DIY Plastic Bags turned into tote bag

http://www.fresheggsdaily.com/2012/01/make-your-own-feed-bag-tote.html
http://www.communitychickens.com/diy-chicken-feed-sack-tote/
http://www.instructables.com/id/Grocery-tote-bag-made-out-of-40lb-birdseed-sack/
http://www.instructables.com/id/Feed-Bag-Tote-Bag/?ALLSTEPS
http://makezine.com/2007/08/02/plastic_bag_crafts/

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Lightweight Disaster Recovery Simulation: Dungeons and Dragons style

Disasters happen. When they do, are you ready to handle it with grace? In general people get good at handling events that they experience regularly, but high-risk disasters are managed so they don't happen often. It's not every day that power goes out at the primary data center, but when it does you want to be sure that your auto-fail-over actually works. You want to be sure your backups actually work.However, testing disaster preparedness often takes too much time time and creates little organizational value.

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Nexus5 Unlimited talk/text/data for $45 per month (seriously)

You could also call this "Free Nexus5 if you switch from AT&T or Verizon." Here's a comparison of the plans and how I arrived at the idea of "Free" Nexus 5.

Item Verizon StraightTalk
Phone purchase price Subsidized $200 every 2 years No subsidy
Monthly cost for 2 lines $190 $90
Minutes included 1400 Unlimited
Text included 500 Unlimited
Data Unlimited originally, switched to 2GB for the same rate Unlimited (2.5GB cap, after that 3G service)

This chart shows how much money both of these plans cost. I used a MotoX as the subsidized phone since it is similar in specs to the Nexus 5.

Comparison of Verizon and StraightTalk plans for 2 years

For our 2-phone-household, we had been spending $4,658 in a 2 year cycle compared to our annual of $2858. Both of those numbers feel pretty high, but at least with StraightTalk we're saving $1,800 in a 2 year cycle. Source data for that chart is in this spreadsheet

Let me say that again: $1,800 savings in a 2 year cycle! We could actually buy a new Nexus phone (or similar) every year and still save money compared to Verizon.

Enter the Nexus 5 and StraightTalk

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Grepping Jenkins job config files

Once you've gone beyond a trivial number of Jenkins jobs you can get into a situation of not knowing which job does which thing. You might say "I know some job is running a query on a table, but which one?" in that case it can be helpful to search your Jenkins jobs.

Managing Jobs by script size

We have two strategies for managing Jenkins jobs: put short scripts into the job itself, but move longer jobs into code somewhere else.

Most jobs use the "execute shell command" Build Step. I also use and recommend the JobConfigHistory plugin to see how a job has changed over time (or who fixed/broke things). When the number of lines in your "shell script" section of the job gets over a maybe 3 or 4 I think it's time to move things to "real code" that is managed by a revision control system with more power than the JobConfigHistory plugin (i.e. git). So, we tend to put things into one of four places: R scripts, Pentaho jobs, Drush commands or bash scripts. All of the R scripts, drush commands and bash scripts are managed with git. The working checkouts of those directories are updated periodically (...by Jenkins jobs :)). So, if I want to grep that external code to see where a particular table is being modified it is very easy to do that. But...what about the one or two line shell scripts that are inside Jenkins jobs?

Searching Jenkins Job config files

First, you have to know about the Jenkins directory structure. The job configurations are stored in files called config.xml located in the Jenkins home directory (often /var/lib/jenkins/). So, if you have a job named production_deploy then the config file for it is located at /var/lib/jenkins/job/production_deploy/config.xml

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