Herein you’ll find (hopefully) interesting tidbits that might be of use to you, and it’s a good place for me to store my various rantings.

You’ll also find my resume- in both an online long form and the more traditional condensed version.

Why is my resume posted online? Well, I got sick of traditonal CV’s and such where you make this blah blah blah list of hot keywords that you hope will help you make it past the filters.

I though, you know what? I explain these various experiences so often to various people, wouldn’t it be great if I could just link to it? Better yet, what about having my fascinating journey through technology in a format where I didn’t have to try to squash it down to n pages?

Joel Spolsky of Joel On Software fame wrote that documentation that nobody reads is useless, and therefore you had to make it easy on your readers. This is advice I’ve taken to heart, and I always try to follow it. To quote the late, great George Carlin, “My job is to entertain and inform.”

So here it is. I’m not giving away any sort of private information. Everyone within earshot of me when a particular point was brought up has probably heard the stories enough to repeat them by heart.

Sorry about that. I can’t resist a good story, even if the cashier at Chevron really doesn’t want to hear about asymmetric encryption right now…

Contents

• Nik’s Online Resume My resume. Online. For the world to see. You’re welcome.

• Nik’s Condensed Resume In case you don’t want to read the fun one.

• Coding Standards My philosophy on coding standards - especially in Golang, and by inference on the rest of life.

• DBT: Dynamic Binary Toolkit- Tools that keep themselves up to date! Never ask your users to update to the latest version again.

• Gomason CI/CD in your pocket Want to test locally? Build, Sign, and publish binaries? Here you go.

• Managed Secrets A YAML Interface on Hashicorp Vault

• TDD Test Driven Development Manifesto

• Python Python Development Tips

• LocalEnv Trick for syncing a CLI environment with your IDE

• IAM Beyond AWS Something I did recently that’s both nasty and beautiful, but most of all useful!

• Distributing Java Binaries via Homebrew A Maven plugin for writing homebrew formulae from templates. Useful if you want to install executable jars via Homebrew and have them just work like any other Homebrew-installed tool.

• One Script OpenStack Installer The hardest parts of OpenStack are 1: setting it up and 2: upgrading it. Here’s a way I solved problem #1 and paved the way to handle #2.

• Using CircleCI as if it was a Maven Repo Using CircleCI? Don’t have a private Maven repo? Check this out.

• LDAP for people with better things to do than master LDAP LDAP can be painful, but everything already knows how to connect to it. Why not connect all the things?

• Documentation My documentation manifesto. How I do docs, and why you might want to consider doing something similar.

• Terraform Auto AMI Rolling Window Auto updating AMI’s with a configurable rolling window so we can stay up to date, but not necessarily bleeding edge.

• Golang Design Tips Some design tips for golang.

• Kubernetes Shell Functions Kubernetes commands can get painful to type. These make it a lot easier to interact with a cluster.

• Talos Linux OIDC for AWS with Terraform Connect your Talos Kubernetes clusters to AWS via OIDC.

• The Three Virtues of a Programmer I didn’t invent them. I didn’t put them online, but Perl was my first programming language, and I feverently believe that these are virtues we should all embrace.