Update August 2022: I have decided to let this project go. I have very little use for it right now, beyond what I've already done. If somehow, that changes, I'll re-alive it, but consider it dead for now.
A while ago, I introduced a simple Python library called "SimpleAWS". SimpleAWS …
read moreI've been using Pelican as my static site generator now exclusively for a while. I've migrated everything off of dynamic CMS like WordPress, because, frankly, I don't need the functionality, and I love the ease and inexpensiveness of hosting things on S3.
I figured I'd outline my Pelican structure and …
read moreI picked up a PyPortal from Adafruit a couple of years ago. It's been sitting on my desk gathering dust, but now that I have a bit more time on my hands, I've been diving into it.
Circuit Python is based on Python, but is hardware focused, and has …
read moreAs you may or may not know, I retired from technology as work as of the end of last year. No more technology projects, no more building web applications for pay, no more figuring out other people's DevOps strategies, etc.
I'm both sad and happy about this. Sad that I'm …
read moreI wanted to weigh in on the current broiling debate on adding ethics clauses to open source licenses. First, a little background: I've been in nonprofit/activist/human rights technology since 1996, and that parallels my open source use and advocacy. I learned about Linux, and first installed it (using …
read moreThe "end-to-end" encryption wave is a great thing - securing the data moving between you and the websites you visit is important. However, one of the issues that presents itself, either when companies keeping track of what you are doing in order to more efficiently sell you things (surveillance capitalism), government …
read moreI (re)started this tech blog two years ago, and I'm rather enjoying this incarnation of the blog. It's a lot more technical, and a lot less snarky. My old tech blog, Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology was fun, and it was fun at times to snark on …
read moreI've known about Tor and onions for quite a while now, but haven't really gotten a chance to dive into them until quite recently. Because I've now had a chance to dive in, I figured I should write some blog posts about what it is, what tools are out there …
read moreI co-wrote a two-part series of articles on static websites with my friend and colleague, John Kenyon. And it got me thinking - how could I build a good workflow for nonprofits to maintain static sites?
The second of the articles outlines requirements for static sites. I've been using Pelican, a …
read moreSorry it's been a while since I've posted - but I'm working on a posting calendar, and hope to be much more regular in my posting.
I spent quite a bit of time recently, working on trying to get data to and from NetSuite using Python. There was so little information …
read moreI've been very deeply involved in the AWS cloud landscape for almost two years now, and before that, I had casually used a couple of AWS cloud resources - EC2 and S3 since pretty much the very beginning of their existence. Although I have spent far, far less time with the …
read moreMany, many years ago, I was reading a science fiction novel (I no longer remember which one,) and there was a scene I still remember. The protagonist walks into her home, sits down, and says to her house, "Any messages?" The house responds with something like "You have 12 new …
read moreThere are a variety of ways python applications can talk to each other. APIs might be the most common way, but APIs have a fair bit of overhead - there has to be something there listening all the time. One other way is asychronous communication via a message broker.
I'd not …
read moreOver the past year and a half, I have become very familar with boto3 which is the open-source SDK for Amazon's AWS resources. It's complicated in many ways, and, like AWS in general, there are always gotchas that will strike you when you least expect it. But it is a …
read moreI took a break from Drupal development for about 2 years, and decided recently (largely for practical purposes) to dive back in. I had spent many years developing websites in Drupal - I started back in 2005 using Drupal 4.7, and I have developed websites on every version since, except …
read moreI've been working through Genetic Algorithms with Python by Clinton Sheppard. I like it a lot. One of the things I like about it is that the author takes a lot of different examples, and step-by-step teaches you the elements of genetic algorithms, and also improves the algorithms over the …
read moreI'm doing a very cool project for OpenIssue, LLC, a company I have been connected to for a number of years. This project involves a lot of API work, including Salesforce, varied database systems, and lots of AWS resources. I expect during the course of this project to get to …
read moreI've been a blogger for a long time. My first blog, called "Pearlbear's blog" was started in 2002. I've had a lot of different blogs, and I currently have 3, this being the one focused on tech. I can't seem to help it.
A long time ago I had a …
read moreAmazon Web Services "Simple Storage Service" or S3 is probably the cheapest and easiest way to serve static web content. There are 3 requirements:
I used 5 different static site generators to generate this new blog. This is a review of those site generators. I decided to test out the top 5, in reverse order of their popularity on GitHub, as measured by the number of stars. The one I eventually chose is: Pelican …
read moreThis is the archive of my old blog, zenofnptech.org, which hasn't been up in years. It's in reverse chronological order. Much of it is outdated, and not particularly useful, but I figured it would be good to have it up …
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