What a title — so filled with keywords. I run a number of different websites on my own personal infrastructure, and over the years I’ve found Kubernetes an effective way to manage multiple sites without having to worry about how they’re running. The auto-scaling and self-healing aspects of Kubernetes —…

One of my favourite features of Google Cloud is a well-hidden feature in the console that allows you to convert your action to the equivalent REST call or command line command. When performing nearly any action on the Google Cloud Platform console, like creating a virtual machine, near the bottom…

Google Cloud Functions are a great tool for running code remotely and not worrying about managing servers. They are a great place to deploy a simple API, or script that’s triggered by a HTTP event. In the spirit of deploying everything automatically, here’s how to deploy Google Cloud Functions with…

One of my best managers told me to let them know when I was looking to move on to bigger and better things. …

Improv and Software Engineering aren’t two things that are often talked about in the same sentence, but I whole-heartedly recommend improv courses to my colleagues in software engineering — here’s why. Developing Your Career Career-wise, taking an improv course is a fantastic way to develop a skill that is often not practiced in…

User experience and user interfaces aren’t the first choice of most companies when choosing a public cloud provider. It’s more important to weigh cost, service level agreements, services offered, and a whole host of other options. For large established companies looking to shift to the cloud — these are top…

For any shared repositories I work on, about once a month I delete everything on my local machine. — When creating a project— besides having a working minimum viable product (MVP) — one of my main objectives is to allow others (and my future self) the ability to easily set up a development environment. The idealized version of that looks something like this: git clone git@github.com:ryderdamen/the_repository.git

Recently I arrived at my gate three hours early for my flight to Toronto. Interestingly enough, an earlier flight to Toronto was on final boarding at the very same gate. …

I’ve found we often underestimate the power of getting up from your desk, heading outside, and talking a walk in software engineering (and so many other fields). At my former company I often met with the sales staff. I loved hearing about the intricacies of their work, and would keep…