In this current environment, you need to stick to your promises. I just ditched my accountant of 3 years. Last week he promised to call. Yesterday he was “too busy with other clients” and promised to call back this morning. I waited all morning and no call. I quickly found a new accountant thanks to my local Facebook community group, who returned my call quickly and shares a background working at Deloitte. He was prepared with questions and able to lock in an appointment quickly. #socialdistancing friendly of course. I’m incredibly excited to be working with a smaller business, someone who can ..read more

If you’re building “secure” cloud solutions, you MUST be deploying infrastructure as code (Azure ARM / AWS CloudFormation / Terraform). If you’re not, why not? What are your organisation’s barriers to making it happen? # This was a LinkedIn musing I thought was worth capturing. The post #LinkedInMusings: Infrastructure as code appeared first on ashleyknowles ..read more

Back in 2011, I was working in Melbourne, flying in/out from my home town every week, for about 3 years, until late 2014. I was subjected to coffee snobbery in its finest. Melbourne, in case you didn’t know, has peak coffee culture; you get coffee wrong in Melbourne and people will literally fight you (exaggeration). My idea at the time was to start a coffee analytics platform, which would have real time analytics of coffee shops based on reviews (this is still a work in progress), but the vision was blurred for many, many years and delayed with all of life’s challenges along the way. This ..read more

Back in 2011, I was working in Melbourne, flying in/out from my home town every week, for about 3 years, until late 2014. I was subjected to coffee snobbery in its finest. Melbourne, in case you didn’t know, has peak coffee culture; you get coffee wrong in Melbourne and people will literally fight you (exaggeration). My idea at the time was to start a coffee analytics platform, which would have real time analytics of coffee shops based on reviews (this is still a work in progress), but the vision was blurred for many, many years and delayed with all of life’s challenges along the way. This ..read more

Over the past 3 years or so working in a software team that develops APIs/integrations between many complex systems, we’ve seen the rise of the JSON Web Token. This humble little block of base64 encoded data is now at the core of most every API we build, and is heavily used in enforcing confidentiality and integrity in many different ways in our landscape. CA’s API Gateway product includes functionality out of the box to handle JSON Web Tokens. But it comes with some nuances. Having been the API Gateway SME across many projects, I’ve had to decipher every bit of how CA’s mysterious JSON as ..read more

Instead of logging in to the (ISC)2 endorsement portal or trying to navigate through the horrible website menus, you can just load up a Postman/Curl request curl -d '{"FirstName":"YOUR-FIRST-NAME","LastName":"YOUR-LAST-NAME","MemberNumber":"YOUR-MEMBER-NUMBER"}' -H "Content-Type: application/json" -X POSThttps://www.isc2.org/api/MemberVerification/MemberVerification If you’re using postman or similar you can populate with the following: Method POST URL https://www.isc2.org/api/MemberVerification/MemberVerification HTTP Headers: Content-Type: application/json Body/Data ..read more

Preparation: I don’t study well. I prefer to measure my current understanding then fill in the gaps; which I wasn’t able to really do until the past week or so; I got a good grasp when attending a training course that I understood most of the content fairly well, especially in the technical sections. Booked the exam 3 weeks prior and that was my motivation to get moving. Didn’t really put much effort into studying until the week before; had picked up the materials here and there over the past 6 months, but not much more than a quick read on the bus to work a few times per week. Experien ..read more

Ethereum is the new Bitcoin, if you choose to believe it. I was recently introduced to Ethereum when I was browsing the Microsoft Azure service catalog and came across their blockchain simulation service, which allows you to spin up a test network to deploy Distributed Applications (DAPP’s) onto an isolated Ethereum blockchain network. Pretty cool stuff in itself, and not today’s subject! Why are you reading this? You’ve read all the news stories about the success of Ethereum and how Ethereum is nearing $200USD You’re Australian and can’t figure out how to buy Ethereum What is Ethereum? Et ..read more

Back in March, the BOQ Hackathon was held in Brisbane, and after reviewing the mentor list, I did some research about what the different mentors brought to the hackathon and if I could learn anything from them. One of the mentors had created a website, “KanyeTexts” in a day, using a bunch of cloud services linked together; accepting payments, and sending many, many annoying Kanye West text messages to friends/enemies. It got me thinking immediately of creating a Taylor Swift version… Lessons Learned Use off the shelf products to create “minimum viable products”. Using Stripe/Zapier/Twilio, I ..read more

Microsoft introduced support for SQL Server AlwaysOn Availability Groups with BizTalk 2016; and it’s a fair bit to digest. Availability Groups is available in SQL Server 2016 Enterprise Edition, and introduces some valuable and important options for disaster recovery and high availability. Implementing these features to provide resiliency and protection for BizTalk requires even more understanding and a lot of complexity. Overview SQL Server AlwaysOn Availability Groups (AAG from here on in) is essentially an extension of what we previously know as database mirroring; with a healthy dose of st ..read more