Robotic lawn mowers are quite cool and have advanced quite a bit in the past few years with the launch of an AWD model in late 2019 from Husqvarna. What is incredibly interesting to observe is where the mower is located and has been over different time intervals. The mobile…

When Ackly was built it was done quickly like all MVPs to get from idea to deployed and in customers hands as quickly as possible. In making an initial framework decision, we put together a small table comparing a few options from the officially supported/built tools. It was clear that…

Most Engineering teams provide a realtime support channel with Slack for their services and processes. These channels can get very busy with a lot of questions and comments. To encourage questions and great interactions with customers a minimal level of tracking and guarantee of support during business hours is helpful. …

An overview in going from idea to published in the App Directory in Slack in just a few steps. This assumes reasonable familiarity with Bolt (Slack’s JavaScript Framework) and Engineering Support Channels in Slack. What We Will Build Background One of the common challenges in managing Infrastructure teams at any sort-of scale is keeping your…

So you want to use CircleCI 2.0 with Golang with Glide. The example provided by CircleCI unfortunately doesn’t use Glide. Here is what I ended up with for a relatively simple build before adding tests to config.yml: version: 2 jobs: build: docker: - image: circleci/golang:1.8 working_directory: /go/src/github.com/<github username>/<project> steps: - checkout - run: go get -u -v -t github.com/Masterminds/glide - run: glide install -v - run: go build -v github.com/<github username>/<project>/<path to application>

Simple monitoring with Stackdriver for GAE Cron Jobs If you write Cron Jobs in GAE you may want to add monitoring for them outside of the jobs themselves. Stackdriver offers various monitoring capabilities as part of the Free Basic Tier that takes seconds to setup. This short post details how…

Why go outside when you are stuck inside writing Macros for a 12GB spreadsheet trying to figure out why the EBS volumes in your R&D environment that are not in use are costing you $74.95/month? Before you head down the path of evaluating AWS cost analysis tools (to the tune…

The current detailed billing transaction view for Google Cloud Platform (GCP) is in its infancy to say the least. It could use some improvement to be able to help you understand where your money is going and this how-to shows you how to fix that. We will build this (or…

Lightly used applications do not need to be running 100% of the time and you shouldn’t be paying for it. If you deploy applications on GAE you will start to notice that you are spending money for two instances instead of just one when your application *is* running. This how-to…