2022 - History

Year

Month

December

2022-12

Continued working with Unleash integrations
- Creating a weekly cron that generates a usage report including users, active/inaction ratios and more to keep the service seat usage at optimal levels
- Opened various issues early to field priority and external concerns
- Planning on creating automated user pruning cron tooling

Created a poc for testing Okta token exchange
- For internal organizational reasons, there is an existing issuer and a new issuer
- The POC was a minimal reproduction of multiple codebases (authentication packages, application deployments)
- The POC demonstrated token acquisition with the existing issuer, and how the exchange works with the same issuer origin, but fails with a new issuer origin
- The POC was documented with a consumable README so that it could run other machines and reproduce the findings as well

Continued direct report 1:1s

Working at home

November

2022-11

Continued polishing Unleash integrations
- Opened unleash access to broader audience, began onboarding consumers

For the Envoy reverse proxy system
- Created an upstream path restriction option, such that any requests going to an upstream pod would be forced to send requests to a specific

Helped initialize a new portal experience
- Using nextjs as a baseline, in particular for its SEO aspects
- Implemented the internal ux library for look and feel
- Upgraded various environment variable / secrets handled portions of the code to match best practice security standards
- Attempted setting up compatible authentication workflows with existing systems integrating with Okta

For the for public storage api service and user interface…
- Experimentally implemented new S3 workflows for optimization multipart uploading, increasing throughput 10x
- Experimentally allowed video content with conditions
- Began exploring alternative options due to platform limitations

Continued direct report 1:1s

Working at home
Went on vacation during November

October

2022-10

Began working on the Unleash integration; our goal was providing limited administative access to Unleash and instead have folks increase transparency and self reliance by implementing a GitOps™️ flow
- Created a ci/cd workflow pipeline
- Pipeline consumes yml and reconciles against the live Unleash server for its state
- Reconcilitation happens on every pr-merge event into the repository main branch
- Implemented the encrypted payload scheme previously conceptualized where the containerized source code remains secure until runtime decrypted by a pod level secret
- Implemented the Unleash Proxy with basic support

Continued direct report 1:1s

Working at home
Visited the local office a few times during October

September

2022-09

Explored options for gathering options of internal organization npm packages
- Considered a postinstall tracking script and service api
- Considered a bot that ran searches on internal github apis to search for usages of well known packages
Considered nuance limitations in these schemes
Considered others approaches for measuring utility and uptake

Created a proof of concept app that shows how rapid application development could produce an artifact that helps aide in RFC discussion
- Created a poc for multi-faceted portal logins
- Used internal ux packages for look and feel
- Deployed rapidly using internal cloud tooling
- Kept poc small and faked portions to show concept rather than polish

Prepared for integration with Unleash
- Provisioned cloud infrastructure for upcoming adoption
- Created Github organization
- Created a poc for keeping containerized unleash source code private while stored in the widely accessible internal ECR

Continued direct report 1:1s

Working at home
Visited the local office a few times during September
Went on vacation during September

August

2022-08

Continued working on a user interface appliance for storage api
- Updated portions of the codebase, simplified patterns
- Polished ui look'n'feel, ux
- Published various alpha, beta released images for community testing
- Wrote setup documentation

Finished the customized middleware service for public static storage api
- Generally available, platform operated, public static storage option

Mixed, a little bit of everything…
- Upgraded Envoy reverse proxy from 1.22.2 to 1.22.5; used staging canary for a week for testing
- Created a basic link portal site with vite and tailwind
- File various issues for internal mui (Material UI) deriviative package
- Produced reproductions of dependencies, images with "critical" CVEs
- Opened RFCs for various platform concerns

Continued extended team meetings to check in personally and professionally
Continued direct report 1:1s

Working at home
Visited the local office a few times during August

July

2022-07

Productionalized the customized middleware service for uploading static file assets
- Added intermediate file scanning service integration
- Added additional e2e tests with eicar file verification
- Statically scanned codebase
- Passed architecture reviews

Attempted Envoy production reverse proxy build script upgrades
- Throughly tracked changes made internally with swc that breaks jest testing with esm/cjs compatible files
- Locked swc version until mock and spy alternatives are available
- Considering refactor without mock and spy

Began working on a user interface appliance for storage api
- Single deployment, using Next for UI and secure api calls
- Using customized mui (Material UI) theme and components
- Using dropzone for drag-n-drop file uploader functionality

Finished the customized middleware service for uploading static file assets
- Generally available, platform operated, public static storage option

Continued extended team meetings to check in personally and professionally
Continued direct report 1:1s

Working at home
Visited the local office a few times during August

June

2022-06

Added arbitrary upstream support to Envoy reverse proxy configuration
- Instead of relying only on internal service name dns resolution
- Allow dynamic configuration of dns (host, sni, port) upstream

Continued work on the customized middleware service for uploading static file assets
- Added Java / Spring Boot flavored usage examples
- Configured Cloudflare settings for CDN / Cache capabilities

Mixed, a little bit of everything…
- Trialed vite on the internal platform; modern tooling offers performance benefits, reduced dependency surface area
- Tested default caching behaviors with Cloudflare, and how cache control header configuration works dynamically
- Enhanced email templating service with additional error reporting features
- Created nginx example repos
- Retired old pandemic era self service / check in tool

Continued extended team meetings to check in personally and professionally
Continued direct report 1:1s

Working at home
Visited the local office a few times during June

May

2022-05

Monitored Envoy proxy while in production with DataDog dashboards and logging
- Approved applications transitioning from legacy deployment patterns to new Envoy proxy pattern
Built a customized middleware service for uploading static file assets (png, jpg, etc)
- Using a private, restricted s3 bucket
- API handles uploads, responds with externally accessible Public URL
- Web streams file to consumers (Cloudflare) and emits well defined caching headers
- Uses Cloudflare in front of service pods to reduce cluster traffic and usage to a minimum
- Self service provisoning of internal client credentials
- Implemented with minio for local development (s3 compatible)
- Implemented fully functioning e2e tests, working across local, pipeline and live modes
- Testing and reviewing with customer teams in limited private beta

Continued extended team meetings to check in personally and professionally
Continued direct report 1:1s

Attended Open Source North 2022 in beautiful Saint Paul, Minnesota at the lovely Saint Thomas University campus
- Saw old friends in person
- Watched a bunch of great talks and presentations from various presenters

Continued working at home
Visited the local office a few times during May

April

2022-04

Graduated Envoy proxy from only development and staging environments, to including production as well
- Onboarded selected internal product teams to begin testing their applications in the lower environments
- Deployed production instances of Envoy
- Began routing legacy traffic through Envoy proxy default routes transparently
Cloudflare configuration
- Used Cloudflare to optimize traffic and use the content delivery network for better user experience through edge performance
- Discovered a bug with the catch-all routing and conflicts with priority settings
- Upon implementing a fix for that bug, some routes on staging and production were temporarily disabled
- Restored staging and production in less than an hour from initial downtime reports

Helped design a file uploading api framework enabling internal customers to host public static assets

Continued extended team meetings to check in personally and professionally
Continued direct report 1:1s

Continued working at home
Visited the local office a few times during April
- Caught a cold

March

2022-03

Graduated Envoy proxy from pilot to operating in development, staging environments
- Created config generator using node, swc, typescript, nunjucks and other packages
- Enforced configuration by validating all inputs strictly using ajv
- Added useful tests to reach 80% coverage, focusing on input validation
- Optimized envoy docker image builds by decoupling the configuration from the image creation process
- Setup envoy configuration file injection at pod startup time to reduce build and deployment times
- Created configuration options for top level proxy redirects, filed an issue with the envoyproxy github issue tracker
- Created a DataDog dashboard for monitoring important metrics assembled via prometheus metrics, logs and other sources

After almost a year of product and software development, the startup product ended based on customer acquisition costs being high and market value not being high enough
Shutdown of Azure based product infrastructure
- Azure DevOps
- Azure Cloud
- Sentry
- Mailgun
- Airtable
- Slack
Created multiple backups of product information in case future teams want to learn from the technology choices

Continued extended team meetings to check in personally and professionally
Continued direct report 1:1s

Continued working at home

February

2022-02

Packaged the customized customized Okta and AzureAd integration for a Strapi installation
- Determined using patch-package was a long term maintenance nightmare
- Trialed a git subtree folder tracking various upstream repositories
- Further refined the package with additional logs, feedback from potential users
Pilot Envoy Proxy instead of NGINX reverse proxy routing subpaths comprised disparate kubernetes pod deployments
- Side-by-side comparison of NGINX and Envoy
- Deep dive into Envoy, clusters, listeners and filters
- Created Datadog dashboards for ample prometheus metrics Envoy provides
- Configured JSON access logs and JSON applicatio logs for Datadog ingestion
- Adapted config generation for Envoy
- Added additional config file options for userbase
- Provided options for situations where Host and SNI was required
- Created embedded Lua script to mimic NGINX redirect rewriting
- Wrote various FAQ documentations to address common concerns

Rewrote landing page to drive product engagement and customer acquisition
- Moved slow loading map and search tools to secondary page, reducing load times
- Added server side rendered content to landing page to provide potential customers value sooner
Made various minor optimizations throughout the site

Continued extended team meetings to check in personally and professionally
Continued direct report 1:1s

Continued working at home

January

2022-01

Packaged the customized customized Okta and AzureAd integration for a Strapi installation
- Using patch-package, extended the baseline strapi-admin package with middleware and ui hooks to handle Customized Okta and AzureAD
- Added copious logs to help future debuggers
- Added abundant comments to extensions to help future debuggers
Continued exploring an NGINX reverse proxy
- Used various rewrite and redirect rewrite rules to enable special handling of legacy deployments
- Generated NGINX config files with various schema packages for YAML, JSON Schema and Jinja2
- Presented NGINX reverse proxy as proof of concept

Performed a test integration with a Next app and NextAuth package
- Rewrote portions of the app to accommodate session based auth vs in memory
- Rewrote portions of the sign in / sign out workflows
- Implemented customized token fetching enabling Client Side and Server Side rendered compoennts data fetching to the API layer
- Submitted a pull request adding callback customization to the NextAuth package it was not merged yet
Added API authentication with the usual Nest primitives
- Added public route annotations
- Added identity endpoints for getting current user info based on token
- Added jwks token validation

Continued extended team meetings to check in personally and professionally
Continued direct report 1:1s

Continued working at home

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