The term 'serverless' is awfully in-vogue today, and I get the sense its utterances have started provoking eye-rolls and sighs from beleaguered technologists, desperate for a respite from the bluster of marketeers and buzzword-enthusiasts.continue reading →

July 2016 Update: this was a worthwhile experiment, but I've retired this approach for provisioning my own CloudFormation stacks in favour of a better tool: fab_aws.

CloudFormation is one of my very favourite aspects of working within the AWS ecosystem...

I interact with multiple, disparate AWS profiles every day via the aws CLI tool. Here's how I ensure my aws commands end up in the right place: continue reading →

As mentioned here at least once before, I'm a big fan of Bower for handling front-end assets in Rails and Middleman sites. It works particularly well for stylesheets and JavaScript: bower install a resource, wire up the stylesheets and JavaScript in the application.css.scss and application.js manifests respectively, and you're done.continue reading →

I decided to revamp how this site is built and hosted - out of a desire to simplify the site, and control its entire stack from the content payload to the host itself. The site remains statically-generated, but the generation now happens in Middleman instead of Octopress. Additionally, repo-level GitHub Pages hosting has been dropped in favour of nginx serving the site directly from a Digital Ocean droplet. This is a few notes on the migration experience, and the ultimate configuration I've ended up with. continue reading →

One of the more tiresome aspects of self-directed investing is keeping track of a single logical portfolio that spans multiple accounts on an up-to-date basis. For a Canadian individual, this is quite often as many as three separate accounts – RRSP, TFSA, and non-registered.continue reading →

Word-processing documents are, charitably, a less-than-ideal way to represent textual content. As a recipient, they necessitate the presence of current and often expensive application software (i.e. Microsoft Office) - at least if you want to view the document with its original visual fidelity intact.continue reading →

There's a pretty substantial effort around the Internet to get SSL/TLS (i.e. HTTPS as far as the web is concerned) deployed as widely as possible in favour of unencrypted-HTTP. I won't enumerate the reasons here, though I will direct the reader to Tim Bray's excellent Private by Default post on the topic.continue reading →

It'd been some time since I'd set up a full Rails stack and deployment process on Amazon Web Services. I thought it would be worth trying out rubber from scratch to provision a full {Nginx, Passenger, PostgreSQL} stack on a single AWS host, with as much automation as possible, but without prematurely resorting to the cognitive-overhead of Chef/OpsWorks. This is my attempt to document the process, as I ran into a few roadblocks along the way. continue reading →

I've been watching the ascent of automated index investing services (e.g. Wealthfront) in the United States with keen interest, and I have been looking forward to the arrival of similar services in Canada. The value proposition is pretty straightfoward: you invest in securities (i.e. ETFs) in accordance with your savings goals, time horizon, risk tolerance, etc – and they take care of the messy details such as trading, rebalancing, and even tax-loss harvesting.continue reading →