Skip to content

The personal website of Phil MassynΒΆ

HOWTO: Host your own reporting platform on AWS

Metabase and Grafana are both quite capable reporting platforms. Both vendors offer you the ability to run the software for free on your own infrastructure, so it's quite an attractive option for companies who would like to have some business intelligence capability without breaking the bank. In this guide, I will show you how can use the Cloudformation template to deploy these reporting tools on your aws environment.

Security is not Compliance

Some companies like to combine their Security and Compliance teams into one entity. I've worked in environments like that before, and I can tell you from experience that it is usually a bad idea to mix the two. Let's dig into it.

Coding with AI

Tools like ChatGPT have been a game changer in a lot of industries. There is a fear floating that AI will replace programmers, displacing more jobs. Over the past year I have been using these tools in my own coding journey, and I learned a few things along the way.

The Art of Troubleshooting

As technicians, we often have to solve some difficult problems. I've had my fair share of whoppers, were I thought the world is coming crashing down. After a while, I started learning a process for dealing with technical problems.

Generate documents with Jinja2 in Python

There are cases where you record data in a number of data sources, and then need to generate documentation from that data. One case I get involved in from time-to-time is to generate documentation from data collected in various data sources. Rather than copying-and-pasting, we can use code to dynmically generate documentation. In this post, I will show you some examples in how we can use jinja2 to generate markdown in Python.

Security for Engineers

Many of us have the need to develop code, code that may have access to very sensitive data, or code that has the ability to wreck havoc on an environment. Whatever the development requirement is, there is a need to be vigilant with the code you develop, and ensuring that you do not inadvertently introduce security issues that could otherwise have been avoided.

Involuntary Data Breaches

An involuntary data breach is a data breach where you information got compromised without your direct involvement. This is typically where your information is stored in a data location that you're unaware of, or have no control over. In a recent security incident, my own contact details have been exposed, through a friend's compromised phone. This is the story of that event.