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Unconventional Secure and Asynchronous RESTful APIs using SSH

Some time ago, in a desperate search for asynchronicity, I came across a Python package that changed the way I look at remote interfaces: AsyncSSH.

Reading through their documentation and example code, you’ll find an interesting assortment of use cases. All of which take advantage of the authentication and encryption capabilities of SSH, while using Python’s asyncio to handle asynchronous communications.

Thinking about various applications I’ve developed over the years, many included functions that could benefit from decoupling into separate services. But at times, I would avoid it due to security implications.

I wanted to build informative dashboards that optimize maintenance tasks. But they bypassed business logic, so I wouldn’t dare expose them over the same interfaces. I even looked at using HTTPS client certs, but support from REST frameworks seemed limited.

I realized that asyncssh could provide the extra security I was looking for over a well known key-based system. And in my never-ending quest to find what makes things tick, I decided to take a stab at writing a REST-ish service over SSH.

A great way to familiarize myself with the library and the protocol, it helped me learn more about building asynchronous apps, creating a small framework called korv.

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Practical Log Viewers with Sanic and Elasticsearch - Designing CI/CD Systems

One of the critical pieces in a build system is the ability to view build and test output. Not only does it track progress as the build transitions through the various phases, it’s also an instrument for debugging.

This chapter in the continuous builds series covers how to build a simple log viewer. You’ll find details on retrieving log entries from Docker containers, serving them through Python, linking from a GitHub pull request, and highlighting the data for easy reading.

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Painless Status Reporting in GitHub Pull Requests - Designing CI/CD Systems

Continuing the build service discussion from the Designing CI/CD Systems series, we’re now at a good point to look at reporting status as code passes through the system.

At the very minimum, you want to communicate build results to our users, but it’s worth examining other steps in the process that also provide useful information.

The code for reporting status isn’t a major feat. However, using it to enforce build workflows can get complicated when implemented from scratch.

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Awesome Webhook Handling with Sanic - Designing CI/CD Systems

After covering how to design a build pipeline and define build directives in the continuous builds series, it’s time to look at handling events from a code repository.

As internet standards evolved over the years, the HTTP protocol has become more prevalent. It’s easier to route, simpler to implement and even more reliable. This ubiquity makes it easier for applications that traverse or live on the public internet to communicate with each other. As a result of this, the idea of webhooks came to be as an “event-over-http” mechanism.

With GitHub as the repository management platform, we have the advantage of using their webhook system to communicate user actions over the internet and into our build pipeline.

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Effortless Parsing of Build Specifications - Designing CI/CD Systems

Every code repository is different. The execution environment, the framework, the deliverables, or even the linters, all need some sort of customization. Creating a flexible build system requires a mechanism that specifies the steps to follow at different stages of a pipeline.

As the next chapter in the Comprehensive CI/CD Pipeline and System Design series, this article examines which instructions you’ll want to convey to your custom system and how to parse them. The focus is around a common solution, adding a file into the repository’s root directory that’s read by your execution engine when receiving new webhooks.

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Integrating Pytest Results with GitHub

When joining a new engineering team, one of the first things I do is familiarize myself with the dev and test processes. Especially the tools used to enforce them. In the past 5 years or so, I’ve noticed that a lot of organizations still use older tools that haven’t yet evolved to support modern practices. Even teams that purely develop software can find themselves working around cumbersome systems that hinder instead of enable.

What do I mean by that? Very few of these tools include useful interfaces to leverage integrations with other systems (like REST APIs). Most have no concept of modern dev practices like continuous integration or containerization. Almost all of them want to record pass / fail at a step by step basis as if you’re executing manually. The vast majority are built around a separation between test and dev (some even emphasize it). And a lot of them require the organization to hire “specialists” for the purpose of “customizing” the tool to the team. In my opinion, these types of systems coerce the organization to emphasize blame over quality and team boundaries over productivity.

I’ve been very successful at building long-lived alternatives to these systems in several organizations. I’ve done it enough to know which features are worth including, and which to leave to the test / dev engineers, especially after the advent of continuous integration and delivery.

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Using GitHub as a Flat Data Store and AWS Lambda to Update it

I spend most of my day, every day, knee deep in code. Optimizing, building, fixing and thinking through workflows can be taxing. This means that the last thing I want to do when I come home is deal with more programming. But I also like learning new things and communicating my experiences so they can help others. I do that through the posts in this website.

Maintaining a web presence without dealing with code means you get to use as many off-the-shelf components as possible. You consider things like WordPress or static site generators that let you concentrate on content, while handling the user interface for you. Write in markdown, build the website, rinse repeat with updates. It’s all very easy, until you need a little more interactivity, like a comments section, or a newsletter signup.

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