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Wilson Mar

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Posts listed chronologically

2024

(Dates in) History

The most significant events in world history, in chronological order.

PowerBI

Make better decisions visualizing data using DAX and Data Models. Pass Microsoft's PL-300 (formerly DA-100)

Acronyms

Because it's often difficult to know where an acronym is from, here are all 900+ in one page to cover Business, Finance, Marketing as well as: AI/Quantum IT,...

Microsoft Fabric

Azure cloud SaaS (Serverless) data handling and real-time analytics using the Data Lakehouse architectural pattern. Pass the DP-600 exam.

(Mitre's) Attacks

How to to protect IT assets by mitigating attacker TTPs defined in Mitre's ATT&CK

SOC2

How to get a CPA attestation report on each service organization's information security controls, so salespeople can close faster with prospective customers ...

Flight Simulator

Use Microsoft's Flight Simulator to fly around the world in various planes, experiencing real-time weather on a Windows PC or Xbox X.

Prometheus

Collect metrics (for visualization by Grafana), analyze using PromQL coding, and identify alerts, especially for Kubernetes (also from CNCF).

GenAI (Generative AI)

Generate new text, images, audio, and video rather than discrete numbers, classes, and probabilities.

Python Samples

My experiments at coding Python for production use of Vault on AWS, Azure, GCP, in a production setting

Azure Machine Learning

Automate ML workflows in the Azure PaaS cloud, so you can get certified in AI-900, AI-102, and DP-100

Cyber Security

Enterprise data risks and vulnerabilities and how to mitigate them with controls

Cyber Ranges

Proving grounds with safe sandboxes for experimentation and testing of how a full stack of technologies integrates and operates.

Feature flags

Evaluate the options for real-time feature configuration and impact control, coded in Python and other languages

Kubernetes (K8s)

A deep dive on how to orchestrate containers, especially in clouds, including OpenShift. Pass the CKAD and CKA exams.

MacOS Homebrew

How to create brew formulas for installation on macOS

Home Assistant

Control a wide range of IoT devices using Python on Raspberry Pi, iOS, and Android

Xcode (install on MacOS)

Homebrew, Python, and other development tools require utilities included in Apple's Xcode IDE or in Command-Line utilities installed separately. Thus the con...

SOC

How our Security Operations Center (SOC) detects and responds to security threats using software for SIEM (Security Information and Event Management) and SOA...

Dashboards

Tips and tricks to display metrics in dashboards that are easy to understand actionable

SLSA

Establish security based on SLSA (Supply chain Levels for Software Artifacts) DevSecOps standards and controls.

Actions

The systems and processes that are the foundations for effective security and governance.

K6

Code JavaScript to do GUI & API performance tests locally and in their k6.io SaaS cloud

SIEM

How our Security Operations Center (SOC) detects and responds to security threats using software for SIEM (Security Information and Event Management) and SOA...

CONTRIBUTING.md

here's a sample CONTRIBUTING.md file in GitHub repositories describing how to contribute.

Quantum (AI computing)

The actual tech for terms (Teleportation) that's been overhyped by Hollywood movies. This is about how to prepare for when computers are 300X faster than the...

Chaos Engineering

Use Gremlin, Chaos Monkey, and monitoring tools (such as Datadog) to measure and improve MTTD and MTTR

AKeyless

Safely retrieve static secrets from the enterprise-scale HA multi-cloud SaaS AKeyless, automatically from various programming languages.

Alexa (from Amazon)

Here are my notes on creating Alexa skills programs, now with more AI than ever!

Jira

How to use Jira for good, not to create frustration

Outsystems

Generate feature-rich web and mobile apps using low-code running within a full suite of enterprise-grade utilities and services

Threat Modeling

This is perhaps the most impactful analysis, considering the importance and urgency of keeping your organization from being stolen

SwiftUI

Use Apple's XCode IDE to build native VisionOS apps for Vision Pro, iPhones, iPads.

Mac setup

Quickly build and update your macOS laptop with the most useful software for developers -- no more dreading losing your laptop, using my shell script.

2023

Azure Key Vault

Automation and every manual step to set up a production-worthy HA Key Vault in Azure cloud, then retrieve secrets using various programming languages.

Job Search

The procedures I've found helping land a remote job within an acknowledged Great Place to Work

Kali (Linux OS)

Install in AWS, Azure, GCP clouds (with Burt Suite, Postman, etc.) for security audits and penetration testing

MacOS Bootup

To diagnose and troubleshoot getting started (vs. Linux)

IoT Raspberry Install

How to setup a Raspberry Pi on macOS with Raspbian, Python, Node, Ansible, Kubernetes

AWS Onboarding

Tips and tricks to get account. Lock down root accounts. Install and use the AWS CLI, securely

.Net Development

Write C# Azure Functions and cross-platform .NET Core apps within the Microsoft ecosystem

HashiCorp Vault

How to keep secrets secret (in a central place), but still shared and refreshed.

Azure Onboarding

Here's automation and steps to minimize manual toil and mistakes but build-in secure practices and mechanisms to build global enterprises need. Not just for ...

Databricks

Create Analytics visualization dashboards pulling from Datalakes and DeltaLakes SaaS on Azure and AWS, coding ApacheSpark SQL, Python Notebooks, low-code Aut...

Azure networking

vNets, Peering, NSG, CDN, Scaling with Load Balancers, Gateways, Firewall, Front Door, Traffic Manager, DDoS, to get AZ-700 certified.

OWASP

Practice finding security vulnerabilities within ZAP or the Broken Web App by running SCA, SAST, DAST, IAST using open-source SonarQube, Sonatype, Synopsys a...

Norway

Notes about my visit to Norway on the Queen Victoria Oct-Nov 2023

Packer (from HashiCorp)

Automate (repeatable) creation of Windows server within VMware Fusion images to make Vagrant boxes on macOS

WordPress

A vibrant ecosystem for quickly building and maintaining dynamic feature-rich websites

Fonts

You are what font you use

Museums Roadtrip USA

Visual, architectural, and culinary art in every state and major city, mapped by Machine Learning

DevSecOps

How to get people to use products and processes that yield faster competitive speed AND improved Security Posture throughout a secure SDLC

San Francisco

Eat and geek your way through walking and riding historic trains in the City by the Bay, all in one day

AWS Certifications

Tips and tricks to get certified: links to tutorials, videos, practice exams.

Splunk

Indexing and visualization of logs, metrics, and other data - with AI

Static websites

Version controlled simplicity using Jekyll and GitHub Pages compared with AWS S3 and CloudFront.

Terraform

Immutable declarative versioned Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and Policy as Code provisioning into AWS, Azure, GCP, and other clouds using Terragoat, Bridgecr...

AWS IAM (Identity and Access Management)

Define allow/deny privileges to actions by users, groups, roles by attaching to each identity a conditional policy file constructed for each of 250+ AWS serv...

AWS Data Tools

AWS data processing tools: Databases, Big Data, Data Warehouse, Data Lakehouse

OPA processing Rego language

Write Rego language policies code for decision by an OPA (Open Policy Agent) within Terraform, Kubernetes, etc.

Copilots

Damn Automcomplete on steroids - AI tools that provide helps you write code and other tricks.

AWS Config (Compliance-as-Code)

Dynamically audit AWS resource configurations under organization units using OPA Rego, Lambda alerts using SNS through EventBridge, then automatically remedi...

Snowflake (SQL Data Lakehouse)

How to quickly learn and use the cloud-native Snowflake SQL database's AI/ML features on top of AWS, Azure, GCP clouds

Python Certs

The topics for learning the Python language thoroughly, for professional status

Passkeys

Instead of using passwords which can be stolen (via phishing - the most common vector for stolen credentials - setup Passkeys here

Making videos

Tediously using Camtasia, Audacity, OBS, and automating animated PowerPoint on a Mac

Python API flask

Step-by-step using the Flask REST API library using SQLite3 locally in venv on a Mac

IDS (Intrusion Detection Systems)

How to setup Google IDS to send your VM traffic to Palo Alto's Unit 42 security pros who alert your SIEM based on their malware signatures

Okta

Universal Directory IAM via OIDC using JWT over OAuth2 for API and SWA or SAML SSO Authentication with MFA for identity federation using SCIM in cloud or on-...

Classification

Statistics to evaluate classification: Confusion Matrix, Specificity, ROC, and AUC, etc.

DevOps

Skills and certification around the DevOps industrial complex

Google Apps Scripting

If you liked Microsoft's VB script for Word, Excel, you'll love Google App Script for Google Docs and Sheets

Python Coding

The rules shown in samples using Keywords, arguments, Exception Handling, OS commands, Strings, Lists, Sets, Tuples, Files, Timers

Hello-Vault

How to code your app to use HashiCorp Vault to get rid of static database passwords by generating credentials in Secret_ID temporarily in cubbyholes, wrapped...

JFrog (Artifactory and XRay)

All about installing and using an in-house registry of installers, libraries with SBOM, and container images for Kubernetes

HashiCorp Consul

Enterprise-grade secure Zero-Trust routing to replace East-West load-balancing using service names rather than static IP addresses. Enhance Service Mesh with...

GitHub Actions

Run pipelines from within GitHub, for free (instead of Jenkins, CircleCI, etc.)

Design Systems

Specs, libraries, code examples for UX look and feel by Shopify and other big tech companies

Git Signing

Sign git commits and tags (for non-repudiation) in GitHub using GPG, Vault, Yubikey, Keybase

MacOS within AWS

Mac Mini instances without buying hardware within AWS EC2 (and MacStadium): step-by-step and in one command using Terraform

AWS Networking

Setting up VPC (Virtual Private Cloud), IPv6, IMDSv2, IPAM, DNS, Security Groups, WAF, BGP, etc. using CLI, GUI, Terraform, Cloud Formation

Scaled Agile

Are organizations really more Agile with SAFe?

Firewalls

Filter out ads and malware sites on your home network using PiHole.

HashiCorp Boundary

Secure SSH accessing servers in AWS and other clouds: implement Zero-Trust with granular control of least-privilege just-in-time access using HashiCorp Boundary

AWS Security

Securing secrets in Bash shell scripts while learning to pass the AWS Certified Security - Specialty (SCS-C01) exam

AWS CLI

Tips and tricks to install and use the MacOS Terminal for Programmatic access to AWS.

Food (online, delivered)

How I feed via deliveries by UPS, FedEx, and USPS, instead of dining in different restaurants during the pandemic.

Spinnaker

Open-source CI/CD with full features, running in Kubernetes

Log Parsing

Analyze logs using the AWK CLI utility and systems

K8s Operators

Control Kubernetes internals from Golang programs, as a part of the Red Hat Industrial Complex

2022

Load Balancers

Distribute load to scale and upgrade servers with no down time. Also route transactions across clouds using ZeroLB

GitOps

ArgoCD (for Kuberetes Helm), Flux from WeaveWorks, etc.

Investing

How to stay ahead of inflation and recession

AWS Lambda Basics

Scalable stateless short-lived functions. Nothing to do with Java Lambdas.

Self-driving cars

What can possibly go wrong with autonomous vehicle robots smarter than humans?

AWS Service Catalog

Select your way to a set of services to assemble your app, with curated (known-safe) settings (in Terraform too)

Rustlang (Rust language)

Efficient, secure, performant concurrent systems programming that compiles to machine running byte-code

Bash (script) coding

Walk though the tricks (Bashisms) used in a script to install, configure, and run many programs on macOS and Linux

apple-carplay

Apple's integration for practically every car except Tesla

tls

TLS v1.3 (Transport Layer Security), the latest successor to SSL, secures network communications with https protocol and mTLS (mutual TLS) using x.509 format...

Well Architected Cloud

What is your team's maturity at adopting best practices? Here is the comprehensive industry-standard framework from Amazon, Microsoft, and Google

AWS CDK (Cloud Development Kit)

Write dynamic Python, Java, .NET, NodeJs, or TypeScript code which are synth'd into Cloud Formation or Terraform static yaml

Zero Trust

Evolve your traditional systems to new ways before your ransomware adversaries do.

prodsys - production systems

Here we maintain assets SREs (System Reliability Engineers) use to fearlessesly and adroitly face production.

Zsh (Z shell on MacOS)

Apple's heavy hand is forcing adoption of POSIX and even switch to Python, to get away from Bashisms

RBAC vs ABAC vs PBAC (Access Control)

Role, Attribute, and Policy Based Access Control simplify IAM at scale using the most fine-trained way access in AWS, Azure, Kubernetes, and other systems

FedRAMP

The Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) enables cloud services providers to meet one standard for all US fed govt agencies

AWS Amplify

Create and host web & mobile apps in a low-code way within AWS

Elixir-lang

Elixir leverages the Erlang BEAM VM for running low-latency, distributed, and fault-tolerant systems in web development, embedded software, data ingestion, a...

2021

Power Automate

Reduce repetitive tasks using Microsoft's Windows RPA and DPA low-code flows accessing various connectors, augmented by AI/ML

Python

An index to my tutorials about using Python programming

Azure DevOps

Pass Microsoft's comprehensive AZ-400 on DevOps for automated CI/CD pipelines in the Azure cloud as well as GitHub Actions

pytest-bdd

Behavior-driven Development (BDD) by automating Gherkin test specs using Pytest for test coverage analysis, data-driven tests, and localization verification

Internet Computer

A distributed ecosystem for hosting containers (apps) without AWS, Google, Facebook.

Jupyter

"Notebooks" display HTML markup as comments between executable Python code (for Machine Learning and Data Science), for Style Transfer of images, etc.

eXplinable AI

Ask your Machine Learning/AI why it made the decisions it did, to satisfy GDPR and other legislation

TFE (Terraform Enterprise)

Use Terraform's sentinel command on Workspaces from a module registry, to automatically identify RBAC-based violations

Flood the Internet (control JavaScript)

Use Dave Hoeffner's web app (the-internet) which challenge Selenium coders to compare scripts for performance/capacity testing (JMeter, Flood Element, etc.)

Azure Monitoring

How to get logs and metrics ingested and displayed with actionable alerts

Docusaurus (v2)

Build book-like internationalized, indexed, searcheable websites using React made easy

GitHub

How we configure each GitHub repo to maximize teamwork

Pen-testing

My learnings from FreeCodeCamp's Information Security certification and other resources on penetration testing

Git Guardian

Full-featured free secret scanning for open source and small teams on GitHub and GitLab

2020

ServiceNow

ITSM automated in the cloud for Incident Management and other ITSM functionality

InnerSource

Caring about sharing within commerical enterprises using GitHub

Bash scripts (coding)

This sample Bash script contains multiple features: install, configure, and run (then remove) a web app within Docker on macOS and Linux, with one copy/paste

Printing

How to get your stuff on paper from macOS and Linux

WebGoat

Run the deliberately insecure Java app within Docker with a Contrast Security agent reporting issues and trends over time.

AI Ecosystems

Brand names for how corporate overlords are making humans into robots

Make (from) Makefile

How the venerable utility is used in Jenkins and GoCD to invoke shell commands around building Docker images for Kubernetes

Developer Teamwork

Tips for encouraging team Code Reviews, Pair Programming, and other techniques for better quality and productivity

OpenCV Color Python

Use the OpenCV to recognize a portion of your screen and have Selenuium Python click on a portion of it

2019

Streamlit

Create data visualizations declaratively for ML and Data Science on a Mac, powered by Python

Web Scraping

How to use the Scrapy Python crawler framework to fetch HTML which Beautiful Soup parsers, on a Mac for Machine Learning visualizations

ImageMagic

Manage photos and Python Scikit Learn

Tesseract (OCR)

Recognizes text and special characters in image files (after Imagemagic), for 60+ languages (using LTSM machine-learning). Used by Selenium

OpenCV SikuliX robot

Use the OpenCV to recognize a portion of your screen and have Selenuium Python click on a portion of it

Selenium Setup

How to emulate real users touching your web apps using Python controlling Selenium and Beautiful Soup for reading HTML

Virtualbox

Although it doesn't have the path to production like Docker and Kubernetes, it's free (unlike VMware Fusion)

Flood local setup

Install Flood Element CLI to run TypeScript which (like Selenium) emulates manual actions in Google Chrome browsers

AWS X-Ray

Observability: Tracing within the AWS Cloud

SAP Fiori

performance engineering SAP UI5 Fiori sample apps using Tricentis Flood.io Elements

2018

Pulumi

Deploy and control AWS, Azure, GCP, K8S, Serverless by coding JavaScript, TypeScript, Go, Python, etc.

Salesforce NPSP performance

How Gatling is used to measure the speed and capacity of microservices for Salesforce add-on NPSP (Non-Profit Success Pack)

Salesforce Heroku

Start using Heroku with a Postgres database and integrate it with Salesforce

Salesforce Jobs

Where to look, favored certifications, sample job descriptions, tips

Salesforce offerings

Competitors, Languages, Clouds, Industries, Domains, GitHubs, editions, pricing, features, versions

Salesforce Ohana

Offices, Financials, Social media, Communities, Events, Dreamforce, Dreamoji, Store

Chatbots

Computers interacting with people by voices, without keyboards

2017

Kafka

How to make streaming scream

Cloud-Foundry

From Pivotal, the Java Spring Boot web services people.

JVM Profilers

Identify and resolve performance bottlenecks, memory leaks, and threading issues

Cucumber testing

Gherkin user specs drive Selenium tests for behavior-driven development (BDD) within Agile

IntelliJ IDE

This gives you more, free for Java users (who have Eclipse)

Git Rebase

Make it appear that you only made one edit before pushing to the team repo

Swagger-codegen

Install a generator of mock servers and client programs of the PetStore sample app

Why Git?

Git stores changes to use GitHub for backup and change management

Git Whoops

Don't panic. Here's how to un-do mistakes in Git

.NET profiling

Here's how to use Redgate ANTS to make C# really sing on NerdDinner

Time Series

See all 4+ dimensions (time) in visualizations

Image processing

Processing of image files using Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning

Python Robot testing

A robot python mimics what human testers do manually (to entertain real developers)

Testing AI

What can possibly go wrong with robots smarter than humans?

JPetstore

Sample Java Spring app for your abuse and amusement

2016

Vue.js

This is the last framework you'll ever need to switch to, just like ReactJs. And Angular.

IoT Clouds

The value of IoT is the wisdom from analytics and notifications

News feeds

Ways to get out of the Facebook echo chamber

GraphQL API

Now THIS is the industry standard. REST API is so last season.

IoT Camera

How to setup a camera on the Raspberry Pi 3B and other boards

Task runners

Gulp, Grunt, and other noises as it works automatically

Electron

Write and test native desktop apps in JavaScript within Node.JS

Xamarin

Microsoft made it free, as in if you have a license for Visual Studio

Dynatrace (APM)

He sees you when you're sleeping. He knows when you're awake ...

IoT barn feeder

Provide just enough food for animals at just the right time, automatically

MacOS Apps

Applications for a long, prosperous, happy life

Intel IoT setup

It will do what you want if ask correctly, in the proper sequence

Notifications

How the computer gets you to do what you should be doing now

NGNIX

The kick-ass secure front-end web server proxy

2015

2014

Git Stash (automated by a script)

Get tips about the most common git commands (including stash, checkout, etc.) executed in a script so you can experiment on your own

2012

IoT

An index of my work on IoT

My macOS Topics

An index to my work on Apple macOS computers (compared to Linux)

Tuning

Performance testing and engineering with monitoring