Automation Articles
10 Eye-Opening Uses of AI in Aircraft Planning & Scheduling
Artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly transforming all industries. Aviation is no different, except that it has been an early adopter. AI planning and scheduling is one of the most promising applications. AI can automate tasks, optimize schedules, and improve efficiency in various ways. A Birds-Eye View of AI in Flight Current Uses of AI in […]
23 Tedious Tasks to Automate to Reap the Benefits of Artificial Intelligence in Business
AI is rapidly changing the way businesses operate. The first thing most people think of when they think of AI is automation. Automation is one of the most significant benefits of artificial intelligence in business—specifically, the automation of tedious, everyday work. Tedious tasks are repetitive, time-consuming, and require little human thought. They can drain productivity […]
Check Out Automated Testing for CloudFormation Templates That’s Not Boring
tCloudFormation is a powerful tool that allows you to define your AWS infrastructure as code. And like any piece of software, testing is an important part of the software development lifecycle. This is especially important when practicing continuous delivery or continuous deployment. In this post, I present a working example of a CI/CD pipeline for […]
Success! 🙌 Finishing the Migration from Heroku CI to Jenkins on AWS
In Migrating from Heroku CI to Jenkins on AWS – Part One, I went into depth about our migration. We containerized our CI/CD using Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) and the Amazon EC2 Container Service Plugin for Jenkins. This allowed us the flexibility of defining all of the required types of build agents as different […]
How to Migrate from Heroku Continuous Integration (CI) to Jenkins on AWS Like a Pro
In a recent blog post, I spoke about a migration from Heroku to AWS. I discussed the solution that Todd Trimble and I did for a client project. If you are interested in the backstory of this migration, you should check that out. In this post, I would like to dive into what we did […]
Integrate and Deploy React with Phoenix
You’ve just finished your lightning fast Phoenix JSON API, what’s next? Motivation My most recent side project, Contact, is a JSON REST API written with Elixir and Phoenix, designed to be the backend to an instant messaging application (e.g., Slack). There was a hackathon coming up at SEP, and I thought it’d be fun to make a frontend for […]
Virtual Machine Pains and How Vagrant Can Help You
In my last project we were upgrading the database for the application from Oracle 11g to Oracle 12c. I created and configured a VirtualBox Virtual Machine (VM) using these instructions. Then I started to think about how I was going to maintain the VM over the duration of the Project and for future work. This […]
Installing FoodCritic on Windows
FoodCritiic is a linter for Chef Cookbooks. It does an automated code review on your Chef Cookbook and reports violations. See the FoodCritiic home page for a list of violations and how to fix them. Here are steps I used to install it on Windows. Install Ruby Install Ruby DevKit. I put in C:\Ruby-DevKit cd […]
Creating a Chef Cookbook for Windows
The Berkshelf documentation moved to the “official” Chef docs. I found it a little confusing but complete. The purpose of this post is to remind future self how to do this, without having to dig through the docs again. These instruction assume the following is installed ChefDK Version 1.1.16 Vagrant Vagrant winrm plugin VirtualBox I create […]
Ignite DevOps 2017 @ SEP – Chef
Last week I blogged about the Ignite Talks that happened at SEP last month. See below for the slides from the Chef Ignite Talk. Ignite Talk on Chef from Bob Nowadly Build awesome things for fun. Check out our current openings for your chance to make awesome things with creative, curious people. Explore SEP Careers […]
SEP Ignite DevOps 2017
Last month at SEP, our DevOp guild hosted an internal meeting of Ignite Talks. The theme for the talks was Configuration Management. Below is a slide deck I used to kick off the meeting. Over the next several weeks we will post more slides for the talks on Chef, Salt-Stack, Puppet, Docker, Packer and Mac Automation. […]
Every team needs a toolsmith
Every software project is different, and there are subtleties associated with each one. Every project requires unique and specific tools, and we need someone to build them, or each member of the team needs the freedom and responsibility to do it him/herself. I have very little (zero?) tolerance for waste when it comes to automatable […]