Talks

If you ever need to validate certificates or certificate chains before deploying them, Golang provides a near foolproof test method. A 3rd party developed a tool that was then handed off to our DevOps team to manage and maintain. Before I could do any re-engineering work, I had to resolve a critical issue—the certificates on the ELBs were about to expire and needed updating. I assumed that if the ELB, NGINX, or httpd started, it was a good sign. This was a false assumption on my part and I ended up serving a bad chain for a few minutes. This did not break the site, but it was definitely not the way I wanted things to remain. I needed a tool that would fail if the certificate chain provided was incorrect. I wanted a lightweight tool that could be publicly accessible. Conducting a third-party analysis of the certificates and configuration was a requirement. There were no tools that I could find meeting this need, so I decided to build my own. I turned to the open source language, Golang. A detailed breakdown of how I built a tiny web server to fit my needs along with what each package is doing as detailed in the article linked above. ...

If you ever need to validate certificates or certificate chains before deploying them, Golang provides a near foolproof test method. A 3rd party developed a tool that was then handed off to our DevOps team to manage and maintain. Before I could do any re-engineering work, I had to resolve a critical issue—the certificates on the ELBs were about to expire and needed updating. I assumed that if the ELB, NGINX, or httpd started, it was a good sign. This was a false assumption on my part and I ended up serving a bad chain for a few minutes. This did not break the site, but it was definitely not the way I wanted things to remain. I needed a tool that would fail if the certificate chain provided was incorrect. I wanted a lightweight tool that could be publicly accessible. Conducting a third-party analysis of the certificates and configuration was a requirement. There were no tools that I could find meeting this need, so I decided to build my own. I turned to the open source language, Golang. A detailed breakdown of how I built a tiny web server to fit my needs along with what each package is doing as detailed in the article linked above. ...

I had the opportunity to attend and speak at Open Source 101 at NC State’s McKimmon Center for Extension & Continuing Education this past weekend. It’s always nice to visit Raleigh, NC and Red Hat Tower. I met several awesome attendees and speakers while I was in town too. The All Things Open team did an absolutely fantastic job at every facet of this conference. If you have the opportunity to attend one of these events you most definitely should! ...

I spoke at the first Orchestructure Meetup of 2018. I have to admit, this is probably the smoothest run Meetup I’ve been a part of for quite some time. That’s not to say other Meetups weren’t well organized. But, Mario, Bob, and Jorge have their poop in a group. Orchestructure is one great Meetup. If you’re in Michigan, you’re missing out if you haven’t attended. I created a new Go talk for this group. I hope to reuse it to enlighten people on the awesomeness of Go. This talk is title Go: Enabling DevOps To Go Faster. The talk walks through why and who created Go, examples of the things that makes Go great, three uses of Go and the why behind them, and finally walks through how Go has bailed me out in the past. ...

Key Presentation Points: -> What is Go? -> What is Go Good At? -> How Go Bailed Me Out Blog Post: Orchestructure January 2018 Meetup Source: Go: Enabling DevOps to Go Faster - Chris Short (January 2018) (right click, Save As) If you'd like to have me speak at your conference, Meetup, podcast, webinar, live stream, etc. please send me a message. Thank you! Here's a current list of ready to go abstracts that I can speak to at a moments notice.