5 Fancy Reasons and 7 Funky Uses for the AWS CLI

5 Fancy Reasons and 7 Funky Uses for the AWS CLI has a few good examples of AWS CLI usage:

  1. AWS CLI Multiple Profiles
  2. AWS CLI Autocomplete
  3. Formatting AWS CLI Output
  4. Filtering AWS CLI Output
  5. Using Waiters in the AWS CLI
  6. Using Input Files to Commands
  7. Using Roles to Access Resources

There also a few useful links in the article, so make sure you at least scroll through it.

Omnipay – framework agnostic, multi-gateway payment processing library for PHP 5.3+

Omnipay is yet another multi-gateway payment processing library for PHP 5+.  Have a look at documentation and examples here:

Omnipay is a payment processing library for PHP. It has been designed based on ideas from Active Merchant, plus experience implementing dozens of gateways for CI Merchant. It has a clear and consistent API, is fully unit tested, and even comes with an example application to get you started.

Coming from The League of Extraordinary Packages, it seems to be a more popular solution than Payum and the others.  It also looks like Omnipay supports way more gateways than any other payment processing library that I’ve seen.  Here’s the list of the officially supported gateways.  Here’s the list of the third-party contributed gateways. And, of course, you can build your own.

AWS X-Ray – Analyze and debug production, distributed applications

 

I think I’m giving up on even knowing the list and purpose of all the Amazon AWS services, let alone how to use them.  Here’s one I haven’t heard about until this very morning: AWS X-Ray.

AWS X-Ray helps developers analyze and debug production, distributed applications, such as those built using a microservices architecture. With X-Ray, you can understand how your application and its underlying services are performing to identify and troubleshoot the root cause of performance issues and errors. X-Ray provides an end-to-end view of requests as they travel through your application, and shows a map of your application’s underlying components. You can use X-Ray to analyze both applications in development and in production, from simple three-tier applications to complex microservices applications consisting of thousands of services.

Going Pro with Feedly

I’ve been a heavy user of RSS for years now.  I’ve tried and used everything from custom built applications and scripts, to browser add-ons, to third-party services.  Even this very blog’s archives are full migration and review articles form one tool to another.  Here are a few links, if you are interested:

For the last 3 years, I’ve been using Feedly, which I like a lot.  I’ve been thinking about going Pro for about a year now.  Last week, I made the switch.  Here’s why:

  1. I do love the service and want to support it!  After all, I’m spending at least an hour every day going through my feeds.  Sometimes even more.
  2. The Pro version removes the limit on the number of feeds and items in each feed.  Not that I don’t have enough to read, but I don’t like the idea that I might be missing something.
  3. The Pro version provides integrations and easier sharing to a variety of third-party services.  The one that is most important for me is WordPress integration.
  4. Their blog post about the upcoming changes to feed organization was the last drop – I WANT THAT!

Feedly constantly improves the user experience and brings new features.  It works very stable – I think only remember one or two downtimes in the last three years.  Their web interface is very handy and the mobile app works well too.  They have plenty of browser add-ons to make things even easier.

All in all, it’s well worth $5 per month for me.

16 Linux Books and Videos for System Administrator

Having knowledge of Linux is essential for any system administration, middleware, web engineer job.

Linux is used almost everywhere in production or a non-production environment. There are thousands of article, book, video training to explore and learn but that would be time-consuming.

Instead, you can follow one or two related books or online training.

The following learning materials cover a large number of Linux Administration tasks from beginning to expert level. So pick the one suits you.

Source: 16 Linux Books and Videos for System Administrator