Pulumi & AWS minimum viable build

20 May 2022 🔖 devops minimum viable build 💬 EN

Thanks to their website & my old notes on provisioning AWS resources with Terraform, I figured out a minimum viable build with Pulumi for creating a resource inside an AWS playground from A Cloud Guru.

SSH or SFTP into a Linux server from a Windows machine with key-based authentication

17 May 2022 🔖 windows linux intermediate tutorials security integration devops 💬 EN

SSH and SFTP are protocols typically used for “remoting into” a server running the Linux operating system, much like you might use the “Remote Desktop” protocol to remotely operate a Windows machine.

Find a library job with Python

20 Apr 2022 🔖 python 💬 EN

I’ve got a friend who needs a new library job. To help, I wrote a Python script to scrape New York University’s jobs site, New York Medical College’s jobs site, and Yonkers Public Schools’s job site, looking for the phrase librar (which hopefully covers “library”, “libraries”, and “librarian”).

Check a URL with Selenium IDE

06 Apr 2022 🔖 selenium intermediate tutorials web development 💬 EN

It took me a while to figure out how to get Selenium IDE to click a link, wait for the new tab’s page-load to settle down, and validate the URL of the new page, but I did it.

Loop through Trigger.new all you want

05 Mar 2022 🔖 salesforce tips 💬 EN

In Salesforce Apex, you can loop over Trigger.new as many times as you’d like.

Cover Letter Examples

24 Feb 2022 🔖 professional development 💬 EN

I’ll keep a running set of cover letter examples in this post.

Cover Letter Flowchart

23 Feb 2022 🔖 professional development tips 💬 EN

Heaven help me, I hope I don’t regret publishing this next time I apply for a job – I’m practically handing over the secret decoder ring to my inner thoughts. 😅

One of my hobbies is giving people cover letter makeovers. Having been blessed with the opportunity to screen resumes many times in my career, I’ve had a chance to pick up tricks from the best of the best, and I think I’m pretty decent at helping people make themselves look good in a way that’s completely honest and upstanding.

The answers to two questions guide the tone and structure in any cover letter I help write:

SFTP and SSH authentication patterns

28 Jan 2022 🔖 architecture integration 💬 EN

When you automate business processes into “Extract, Transform, Load” (ETL) jobs, there’s a good chance that you’ll need to use one of these two major internet-based communications protocols:

1. SFTP (for making your server upload or download files to/from a 3rd party’s server)
2. SSH (for making your server execute commands on a 3rd party’s server)

There are two common ways of proving your identity in these kinds of inter-server communications.

Connect to a database from Windows

25 Jan 2022 🔖 databases sql beginner minimum viable build 💬 EN

Relational database management systems (a.k.a. RDBMSes or DBMSes) generally run on computers in the cloud that behave as “servers.”

These days, most people use their web browser to make their computer behave as a “client” so that they can read or edit a given database. Rather than connecting their computer directly to a database server over the internet, they connect to a web site, and the web server hosting that web site connects to the database server hosting the database.

However, certain specialized tasks still require making a direct internet connection (over a protocol such as ODBC) between your desktop computer and a database’s server. This article takes a tour “under the hood” of how Windows can connect directly to two common brands of database: Oracle and SQL Server.

Read an NDJSON file with anonymous PL/SQL

21 Jan 2022 🔖 databases sql integration 💬 EN

I keep having to go back to old scripts and remember how I read from an NDJSON-formatted file into Oracle PL/SQL memory. (NDJSON is hacky JSON that works great as input to programming languages that are accustomed to reading or writing one line of text at a time when working with files.) This post contains a baseline I can start with from now on.