Aaron West's technology blog

Years of Experience

Sun, 20 Jun 2021 10:40:00 -0500

Are you making the most of your career and your years of experience? Do you have a plan and a deliberate approach? After the break, I explore these questions and a real situation that may lead you to think about your experience with a fresh perspective.

A few years ago I was interviewing candidates for a senior software engineering position on my team. After a couple of weeks of interviewing two candidates stood out. The first had 10 years of experience using our preferred programming language, tools, the works. Their current team was practicing the same agile methodology we were. They had experience working on projects similar to ours and in the same industry. Furthermore, the first candidate had a great attitude, was easy to talk with, and the cultural fit was there too.

Twitter Now Supports Multiple 2FA Security Keys

Sun, 04 Apr 2021 10:57:00 -0500

I recently upgraded my YubiKeys with the purchase of two 5C NFC devices. I worked through all the ways I use YubiKey and as I was updating my Twitter security settings I noticed something new. Twitter now supports multiple 2FA security keys and is one of the first sites I’ve run across to do so. It was great news for me as I was setting up my new 5C YubiKeys in tandem. One I would keep close by if not on me at all times and another to go in a safe. Both configured the same.

Recap of 2011 posts

Sun, 07 Mar 2021 14:55:00 -0600

I spent time this weekend migrating my 2011 blog posts from the old site design to the new static design. Despite it being monotonous work it was a fun stroll down memory lane. I wrote about a bunch of different topics that year and after the break, I discuss a few of the posts that were particularly interesting and impactful.

Most popular blog posts

Two of my most read blog posts ever come from 2011. I wrote two “super guides” which discussed how to install and configure the ColdFusion application server on Ubuntu and CentOS Linux. As I often do, I wrote those blog posts explaining everything you needed to do to get up and running with ColdFusion on Linux. From the basic installation process to tweaking JVM memory settings, to securing things server-side. I’ve been fairly successful with this approach and those two posts are shining examples. All told, they amassed just over 400,000 views.

Modernizing This Website

Sun, 28 Feb 2021 11:34:00 -0500

Welcome to the new, modernized, mobile-friendly aaronwest.net. I’ve been writing on the Internet for nearly 20 years in one form or another. My journey started in the early 2000s when I set up a virtual Linux server and blogged at trajiklyhip.com. After a few years, I acquired aaronwest.net and switched everything to the new domain and new blogging software. I still ran my own Linux server where I managed an Apache webserver, ColdFusion application server, and MySQL database backend. It was quite a bit of work managing the full stack of software but I loved it. Writing software was not only my day job but something I cared so deeply about I spoke at developer conferences, led hands-on software engineering workshops, and eventually moved into technical leadership roles.

What I'm Reading This Week - April 13, 2018

Fri, 13 Apr 2018 14:00:00 -0500

I spent a lot of time this week reading about how different engineering teams have scaled their Hadoop infrastructure. I also spent time looking at consistent hashing strategies, how GitHub manages DNS and routing, and how individual personalities affect team culture and performance. Read on for all the details.

Transit and Peering: How your requests reach GitHub

One of GitHub’s infrastructure engineers talks about they use Geographic DNS routing and network peering to impact how their traffic is shaped. Through their efforts they were able to direct 60-70% of GitHub traffic through optimal routes.

Automating Text Messages with Tasker

Fri, 20 Nov 2015 20:00:00 -0600

My wife likes to know when I’m going to be home after work. She often makes dinner for the whole family or the kids need something from me or she simply wants to know when her relief is going to arrive.

My commute from the office to home can range from 45 minutes to 1.5 hours. So sending my wife a message to let her know I’m on the way is super helpful. Except I always forget. For a long time she’d remind me and I’d continue to forget.

GitHub Announces Universal 2nd Factor Support

Fri, 02 Oct 2015 10:00:00 -0500

I’ve written about getting started with YubiKey and using a YubiKey to authenticate with GitHub in the past few months. Yesterday, GitHub announced support for Universal 2nd Factor (U2F) and specifically, support for YubiKey devices. You can read GitHub’s announcement here and Yubico’s coverage.

Now, the steps I outlined to get up and running with a YubiKey and GitHub aren’t needed. With GitHub’s new U2F integration you simply set up a new device from your security settings. Instructions on how to do this are here.

YubiKey and GitHub Two-factor Authentication

Fri, 04 Sep 2015 14:50:00 -0500

I was able to get my YubiKey Edge working with GitHub Two-factor Authentication recently. On github.com I went through the two-factor setup and selected the authentication app option. When I got to the screen with the QR code I launched the YubiKey Authenticator app on Mac OS X Yosemite (10.10.x) and plugged in my YubiKey Edge. I then chose the File -> Add option in the menubar. I actually had to click back and forth between the YubiKey Authenticator icon in the Dock and any other app icon in order to get the YubiKey Authenticator menu to show in the menubar on OS X. Once it was displayed I could click File -> Add.

What's This Engineering Notebook All About?

Mon, 17 Aug 2015 08:00:00 -0500

From May 5, 2002 through March 29, 2014 I blogged at trajiklyhip.com and later aaronwest.net/blog. I wrote 599 posts during this timeframe mostly on programming in Flash, Flex, and ColdFusion. Each post received, on average, 8,053 views. My most viewed post was on installing ColdFusion 9 on CentOS Linux. That post garnered 197,856 views. Total views on the blog to date are 4,823,875.

Many of my posts offered a download of sample code or a complete application. The various files have been downloaded 66,133 times with the most popular download being my twitterAIR application. I wrote the app in the summer of 2007 when Twitter was just getting off the ground.

My Engineering Notebook Website

Sun, 16 Aug 2015 09:13:00 -0500

I haven’t blogged on this website in well over a year. In fact, in 12 years of writing on this site I’ve only published 599 posts. That’s on average 50 posts a year. I think I’ve figured out why it has been so hard for me to add content and posts to this site in the way I had hoped. I was focusing more on getting posts perfect than on getting the basics covered and published.

Better Documentation Using Conventional-Changelog

Mon, 03 Aug 2015 12:45:00 -0500

One of the things I’ve been playing with at work is conventional-changelog and the concept of generating a CHANGELOG.md for most projects. We’ve double-downed our effort to create more and better documentation and as part of the effort I researched ways to generate documentation automatically and have said documentation be as close to the code as possible.

Our team suggested I look at conventional-changelog, a tool two of our engineers were interested in baking into our process. After using it in an R&D capacity for a few weeks I feel comfortable talking about its usage.

Exporting and Importing GitHub Labels

Thu, 30 Jul 2015 10:46:00 -0500

At work we’re in the process of migrating all of our code repositories from Bitbucket to GitHub. Our main driver for this change, and something I should probably write about here, is integrating all of our project management and process orchestration in one tool. This brings our issue management, project planning, state visualization, and more into the tool we use to manage code.

A large part of the migration process is moving our individual repos and getting them set up like they were on Bitbucket. One of these tasks is configuring GitHub Labels in each repo/project. We have a documented and standardized set of labels and I began the process by manually adding each label into the first repo. Then I did the same thing for a second repo. It’s fairly tedious work so I looked around to see if you could export/import labels in GitHub.

How to Background Linux Console Processes

Sun, 26 Jul 2015 13:30:00 -0500

This week our data team were talking about ways to run a Python script without having the execution attached to your console session. There’s more than way one to accomplish this but here’s the one they settled on.

nohup python python_script.py </dev/null &

The discussion reminded me of a similar, and equally useful, workflow we had a Dataium. We used all kinds of databases over the years but in the beginning MySQL 5.5.x was our goto. We operated a fairly sizable database which served as a backend to a desktop Adobe AIR / Flex application. One of the challenges we had with the configuration was performance following a database restart. We approached this problem by writing SQL scripts which mirrored common query patterns from our users. This concept of warming the MySQL query cache was incredibly useful.

How to Retrieve Your Wi-Fi Password on Mac

Thu, 23 Jul 2015 08:00:00 -0500

I don’t generally forget the password for Wi-Fi networks I use, mainly because I use 1Password to store all secrets. But, I ran across the ability to retrieve the password, in plain text, from the OS X Keychain of an SSID I’ve previously connected with. Not a huge amount of utility to this but it’s interesting the capability exists.

In the command below I read the the keychain and hone-in on just the password portion. Replace <SSID_NAME> with the name of of a valid SSID you’ve connected with in the past. Keep in mind case sensitivity matters. You can leave off | grep password and retrieve the whole item too. This command requires authentication so you’ll be asked to enter your username and password.

Getting Started with YubiKey

Tue, 21 Jul 2015 08:00:00 -0500

About a week ago I purchased a YubiKey Edge, a USB security device from Yubico. The company makes several editions of the YubiKey each designed to add security to your interactions on the Internet. The most common use case of the device is functioning as a hardware component in two-factor authentication. Yubico calls this 2FA while others, such as Google, refer to it as 2-step verification. In either case the point is for the end user to supply something they know in conjunction with something they physically have in order to authenticate with an endpoint online.

Flushing DNS Cache on Mac OS X

Mon, 20 Jul 2015 16:43:00 -0500

Below are the various Bash commands needed to flush DNS on Mac OS X. There are several different versions of the commands depending on which version of OS X in use. Ensure you are selecting the command appropriate for your OS. HT to OSXDaily for additional explanations on what is happening under the covers.

Flush DNS on OS X Yosemite 10.10.4 and Newer

When 10.11.x aka ‘El Capitan’ ships this command should continue to function. This set of commands will flush all DNS caches on OS X including Multicast DNS and Unicast DNS.

Generating SSH Keys on Mac OS X

Sun, 19 Jul 2015 16:41:00 -0500

Generating an SSH key without a password. For example, for passphraseless old school Hadoop clusters. This is generally done from within a users home directory such as /Users/username on Mac.

ssh-keygen -t rsa -P ""

Generating an SSH key with a password. This is generally done from within a users home directory such as /User/username on Mac.

ssh-keygen -t rsa

How to copy a generated SSH key to the Mac clipboard. This is arguably better than manually copying and pasting.

Installing and Configuring NTP on Linux

Sat, 29 Mar 2014 12:03:00 -0500

Many of us navigate life each day with a smartphone. And on that smartphone is an atomic clock of sorts. No it isn’t a “real” atomic clock but given a smartphone is typically connected to cell towers and/or a wi-fi network the time and day on a smartphone is generally correct. I’d be willing to bet many of you use your smartphone as your daily watch. We’ve pretty much come to expect we will always have the correct time (within a few seconds) available at a quick glance.

Things We Believe In

Tue, 31 Dec 2013 16:27:03 -0500

During the last two months I’ve been reflecting on characteristics and beliefs of our engineering team at Dataium. I wanted to come up with a few key things which, when communicated to others, would describe some of what makes us “tick.” Sort of an elevator pitch to a potential new hire or a way to describe some of our philosophy toward technology and business. The resulting list below isn’t exhaustive but is a few of the things I picked out to share. These are things most engineering teams should aspire to in my opinion.

Constructive Versus Destructive Language

Wed, 24 Jul 2013 08:47:00 -0600

Throughout my career working in technology I’ve become accustomed to hearing certain phrases from programming and engineering folks. These phrases may seem rather harmless on the surface but I’ve seen how they can tear others down and create a divide between technology staff and others in the workplace. I’ve heard these phrases hundreds if not thousands of times, so much so that I cringe each time I hear them. After the break are some of these phrases and ideas on what you can say instead.

Best Hello World Ever!

Tue, 19 Jun 2012 16:28:00 -0600

Even the best Hello World programs have nothing on this version. Everyone, meet Sam West. Right now he’s in China but we hope to bring him home before Christmas.

What I Like About Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich

Thu, 15 Mar 2012 08:00:00 -0500

I’ve been using Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich (ICS) since January 19 when my Wi-Fi only Xoom received an update from Motorola. On February 25 I upgraded from a Motorola DROID X to a Samsung Galaxy Nexus and since then all my mobile devices have been on ICS. So I’ve had a fair amount of time to test drive the OS in both tablet form and phone form and it is a very nice update. Here are a few of things I like in Ice Cream Sandwich followed by some short bullets of things I think could be better.

Happy Pi Day 2012!

Wed, 14 Mar 2012 09:12:00 -0500

Docking Stations and the Future of Computing

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 13:35:00 -0500

The Verge ran a story earlier about Canonical creating a docking station that provided Ubuntu desktop access for your smartphone.

I called this at least two years ago. Not the specific instance of Canonical releasing a desktop dock for Android device plug-in, but the idea of how this will change computing. If you discount some of the newest quad-core and 8-core systems out there, the latest mobile phones aren’t too far behind laptops in their power. Certainly they don’t have the graphics horsepower but I don’t see that as an issue.

I'm Hiring a DBA and Senior Software Engineer

Mon, 31 Oct 2011 12:13:00 -0600

For those reading this that do not know, I’m the CTO of Nashville-based startup Dataium, LLC. Dataium is the largest aggregator of Internet automotive shopping activity, and I’m looking to hire a Database Administrator and a Senior Software Engineer. Both of these positions are critical to the success and technical direction of Dataium and each will join our already amazing team of engineers, systems administrators, and business analysts.

If you’re interested in learning more about the DBA position, please click here to download the full job description (PDF).

Five Ten Sam Hill Mountain Bike Shoes

Fri, 28 Oct 2011 20:23:00 -0600

Sam Hill MTB Shoes

I’m a platform pedal kind of guy except for a short stint riding my brothers Cannondale racing bike during my high school days. Clip-in pedals have always scared me for some reason and wearing clip-in shoes isn’t my style nor are they very versatile. Given I’ve been riding hard core MTB for a year now I decided to invest in a set of platform pedals and new mountain bike specific shoes.

Riding the Latest Bikes from Trek

Sun, 16 Oct 2011 10:32:00 -0600

Trek Superfly 100 Elite AL

I drove to Columbia (south of Nashville) yesterday to participate in a Trek demo day. This is where biking enthusiasts can test ride the latest Trek bikes in the woods and on the street. I rode four bikes yesterday, three 29ers and one traditional 26 inch. First up was the Trek Superfly 100 Elite AL (aluminum frame) full suspension (white/red bike pictured). This was my first time on a full suspension mountain bike and it was an awesome experience. The ride was plush and bouncy and the 29er picked up momentum quickly and rode over obstacles easily.

It's Working for Me

Fri, 14 Oct 2011 10:55:00 -0600

One of the worst things you can ever say as a developer/programmer is “It’s working for me.” Unless of course that is immediately followed by “..but let’s dig in and figure out why it isn’t working for you.” This type of thinking is a cancer within development teams and certainly isn’t customer focused. Software breaks, apps don’t work properly, and if you’re a developer it’s your responsibility to do whatever it takes to resolve your customer issues. A few years ago one of my dev teams was having tremendous difficulty replicating a customer-reported issue. One of the developers started the whole “It’s working for me” thing and my manager heard it. He jumped in and quickly asked my developer if he was going to package up his computer and ship it to the customer. What a great response.

New Business Card!

Fri, 07 Oct 2011 14:27:00 -0600

We redesigned our business cards at Dataium and the new ones came in today. It’s embarrassing how long it took us to decide on a design and I bet people wonder why when they see the result. We wanted to go the super simple and clean route and the final result is quite nice even if anticlimatic.

Aaron West's business card

Home Page Tributes to Steve Jobs

Thu, 06 Oct 2011 12:11:00 -0600

I thought it was pretty cool big sites (and in some cases competitors) like Google.com and Amazon.com posted tributes to Steve Jobs on their home page. I looked around to see which other sites were doing this and have posted some screenshots after the break. If you know of others please let me know in the comments.

Apple tribute to Steve Jobs

Amazon tribute to Steve Jobs

Photos: A Tribute to the Last Shuttle Mission

Sun, 10 Jul 2011 13:49:00 -0500

On a whim today I picked up Gavin’s LEGO space shuttle and headed outside to take some photos. I got a little carried away and had a ton of fun posing the shuttle against a blue sky background. If you’re interested you can check out the entire set here.

Photos: Omega Seamaster Planet Ocean

Sun, 12 Jun 2011 17:54:00 -0500

For those interested in watches I just published a set of photos on Flickr of my Omega Seamaster Planet Ocean. There’s a lot of amazing tech that goes into an Omega dive watch and the Planet Ocean is no exception. It features a decompression system that allows the watch casing to off-gas helium after the watch has been in a pressure chamber for a long time. Also on board are Omega’s own self-winding Caliber 2500 automatic movement (or the Caliber 9300 if you have the new 2011 edition) with a 48 hour power reserve, an anti-reflective, scratch-resistant sapphire crystal, and a self-locking screw-in crown. All of this in a watch that can go as deep as 600 meters (2,000 feet). You can view the photos here.

Git Workflows: Archiving Old Branches

Tue, 07 Jun 2011 21:57:00 -0500

I decided to take some time today to clean up old sprint branches that have been resting in Git unused. Some for well over a year. I had two goals I wanted to accomplish when trying to come up with a workflow. First, I wanted the list of branches that display with the command git branch -a (which I have conveniently aliased to just gb) to be shortened. Second, I didn’t want to lose any of the commits part of old branches. Sure the commits were already merged into the master branch, but I didn’t want to lose commit chain that was stored as branches.

Aaron Answers: Time Machine Backups Taking Forever

Fri, 29 Apr 2011 15:20:00 -0500

I received an e-mail this morning from Seth, who was having difficulty getting his initial Time Machine backup completed. Seth graciously agreed to having his question posted here in another edition of Aaron Answers. Below is his question and after the break is my response.

Hi Aaron,

I really appreciate your blog, and wonder if you’d be willing to answer a Time Machine question i’ve run into. My old backup HD failed, so I bought a new 2T Iomega eGo desktop HD. Partitioned it into 3 partitions, including a 1.1T partition for my time machine backup. All seems to be working fine, except that the backup is too slow to get done unless I leave the computer running for 3-4 days, which I can’t do as it’s a laptop and I use it all the time. After the first night (8 hours of so) it had only done 20 Gb (out of my 400 Gb). After the second night, it did about 120 Gb. i don’t know if I just need to find a 4-day window when I can leave my laptop backing up or if something is wrong with the software. I’m using the new USB2 cord, and it works nice and fast for manually backing up video files etc to other partitions in the drive. The drive seems to work quite fast. If you’re able to offer any advice, that would be greatly appreciated!

ColdFusion Builder 2 Tour in Nashville

Wed, 20 Apr 2011 09:05:00 -0500

Tomorrow evening (April 21) the Nashville ColdFusion User Group and Dave Ramsey / The Lampo Group are sponsoring a stop on the Adobe ColdFusion Builder 2 tour. If you are in Nashville tomorrow you should head to the Brentwood area to hear Greg Wilson talk about CF Builder 2, ColdFusion, and Flex on mobile including iPad/iPhone.

Food and drink will be provided and prizes will be awarded to some who RSVP. Hit up the NCFUG site to submit your RSVP and get the full meeting details.

Photos from the Nashville LEGO Competition

Tue, 19 Apr 2011 09:00:00 -0500

My son has taken a strong interest in LEGO since Christmas. A few weeks ago the Nashville Public Library sponsored a LEGO building competition grouping entries by age. At the close of the competition the entries were put on display at the downtown library. We took Gavin to see all the creations and I took photos of a bunch of them using my DROID X. The photos aren’t great quality, but you can see them all in a Flickr gallery here.

How to Position the Cursor in the Middle of a ColdFusion Builder Snippet

Mon, 18 Apr 2011 09:00:00 -0500

Earlier this week I was trying to create a new ColdFusion Builder snippet that would insert the current date and time along with my initials into an open template. After inserting the snippet I wanted my cursor to be positioned in the middle of the comment so I could immediately begin writing some notes.

I thought this was done by using the start text and end text fields in the Snippet dialog but no matter what I tried it wouldn’t work. ColdFusion Builder, or perhaps Eclipse itself, kept trimming line breaks from both the start text and end text. After a few minutes of frustration I decided to edit the snippet manually.

Products That Make This Site Possible

Tue, 01 Mar 2011 08:02:00 -0600

For the past few months I’ve been planning on writing a post about the services that make this site possible. I’ve read these sorts of posts on other sites and they seem very marketing heavy. They’re often titled “sponsor post” or something equivalent. This post is different. I’m genuinely a fan (and customer) of all of these services and in most cases I pay for them monthly. After the break I discuss each service/app I rely on to power this site. I put each service within category blocks such as: the server, the app, backups, uptime, etc.

My Review of Evil Plans by Hugh MacLeod

Wed, 23 Feb 2011 10:58:00 -0600

Hugh MacLeod’s latest book, Evil Plans: Having Fun on the Road to World Domination was recommended to me last week so I purchased the Kindle edition. It’s a short book (192 pages) I was able to knock out in four days. I do recommend the book but don’t expect to be given a step-by-step list of todos to create your own Evil Plan. More of my thoughts are after the break.

Before I go further I must mention there are some spoilers below in the form of quotes from the book. I really don’t think this will be a problem for folks as we’re not talking about spoiling the plot of a novel. Nevertheless, if you’d rather discover these passages as you read the book, you might want to skip this review.

I'm Hiring a Software Engineer

Wed, 09 Feb 2011 11:26:00 -0600

For those reading this that do not know, I’m the CTO of Nashville-based startup Dataium, LLC. Dataium is the largest aggregator of Internet automotive shopping activity, and we’re looking to hire a software engineer. We’re specifically looking for someone with skills in several different technologies such as Java, Apache Hadoop, Adobe Flex/ActionScript 3, ColdFusion, and MySQL.

If you’re interested in learning more, the full job description is included after the break.

Super Guide: Installing ColdFusion 9 on CentOS Linux

Mon, 07 Feb 2011 08:14:00 -0500

This post is a followup to my previous guide to installing ColdFusion 9 on Ubuntu. While that post was all about the specifics to getting ColdFusion up and running on Ubuntu, this post is all about CentOS. The overall process is the same and I’m covering all the same steps, but the commands in this post are specific to the CentOS operating system. So why I’m writing this?

Overall, installing ColdFusion isn’t that big of a deal. But I’ve yet to see a guide or blog post that outlines all the other topics related to getting a decent ColdFusion server on CentOS up and running. That’s why I wrote this super guide, to outline what I believe is important to know about installing ColdFusion. Of course, I’m not covering every single possible detail, but I believe I’ve hit on all the major topics. Along the way I sprinkle in my own ideas, thoughts, and what I believe are best practices. After you read this post and walk through all the instructions you should have a very solid ColdFusion / Apache set up on CentOS Linux.

Super Guide: Installing ColdFusion 9 on Ubuntu Linux

Mon, 24 Jan 2011 08:50:00 -0500

As I was finishing this guide on installing ColdFusion 9 on Ubuntu Linux I tweeted how many words made up the text (over 6,000). Several people commented on Twitter and Facebook saying things like: “[the length] seems a bit excessive,” and “is it that complicated?” The thing is, I’m covering much more than simply installing ColdFusion. Overall, just installing ColdFusion isn’t that big of a deal. But I’ve yet to see a guide or blog post that outlines all the other topics related to getting a decent ColdFusion server on Ubuntu up and running. That’s why I wrote this super guide, to outline what I believe is important to know about installing ColdFusion. Of course, I’m not covering every single possible detail, but I believe I’ve hit on all the major topics. Along the way I sprinkle in my own ideas, thoughts, and what I believe are best practices. After you read this post and walk through all the instructions you should have a very solid ColdFusion / Apache set up on Ubuntu Linux.

Blocking ColdFusion Administrator in Apache

Mon, 04 Oct 2010 09:00:00 -0500

Web application security is a difficult topic and can’t be covered completely in a single blog post. After the break I discuss one quick way to block ColdFusion Administrator requests in Apache. I also list other resources that will help you understand ColdFusion security and how to apply practical security constructs on your ColdFusion servers.

As a ColdFusion developer or administrator you should always protect your server by locking out requests to the ColdFusion Administrator. Having a Web-based admin panel for ColdFusion is fantastic but if an unauthorized user were to gain access to it they could cause serious harm to your application, your customers, and your business. Privatizing access to the ColdFusion Administrator should be high on your priority list.

My Blog is Now Hosted at Linode

Mon, 13 Jul 2009 11:00:00 -0500

Last week I accomplished something I had been thinking about for at least a year, moving this blog to my own server. I had been hosting this site with a popular shared hosting provider for nearly four years and had not been happy for a long time. Picking a shared hosting provider in 2005 had been a pretty easy thing to do. I wasn’t too comfortable with managing an entire Linux server so having others take care of it while I simply managed and wrote content was a good choice.

DEL - Page for indexing not yet completed tags

Sat, 01 Jan 2000 20:00:00 -0600