Automation Articles

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SEP Selected as a Nominee for TechPoint’s Innovation Mira Award

TechPoint has announced the nominees for its 25th annual Mira Awards, highlighting the most innovative companies, universities, and organizations in Indiana’s tech sector. The awards celebrate achievements across various categories, including the Innovation Partner of the Year. Nominees in this…
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Manual Testing vs. Automated Testing: Which Best Suits Your Project?

Why are we discussing manual testing vs. automated testing? Good question. I’ll preface by saying this article will not discuss the general importance or necessity of testing. At SEP, it is an integral part of our development process. However, the methods and extent to which our client or we decide to test can vary greatly. […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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