About

My name is Brandur Leach (@brandur). I'm a platform engineer at Heroku interested in Ruby, APIs, Vim, Tmux and terminal productivity, running, fixed gear riding, history, urban design, and metal.

Articles

  • Guaranteeing Order with Kinesis Bulk Puts

    On guaranteeing order with the bulk put API of an event stream.

  • Version Variants

    A simple mechanism for managing changes to a web API and to help cheapen the disposal of prototypes.

  • Small, Sharp Tools

    A few words on the Unix philosophy of building small programs that do one thing well, and compose for comprehensive functionality.

  • Dotfile Secrets and GPG

    Learn how to start encrypting dotfile secrets with GPG, and some techniques for getting those encrypted files integrated with your toolchain.

  • Package Management in Go

    Understanding the benefits of Golang's restrictive (but simple) import and package management system.

  • Command Exit Status

    An exercise of discovery around how to extend the shell's API.

  • The Humble Data Warehouse

    Data warehouses aren't just for the enterprise! Let's examine a few of their basic characteristics, and build some examples with Go/Ruby and Postgres.

  • A Cheap X100S Filter Ring Hack

    If you find that the price tag for a Fuji-official adapter ring for the X100S is a little hard to swallow, this 5-minute hack will save you 90%.

  • Elegant APIs with JSON Schema

    A quick tour through some of the fundamentals of JSON Schema and Hyper-schema, and how they can be applied to building APIs.

  • Testing Distributed Services with JSON Schema

    Stubbing distributed services with Sinatra-based services stubs and enabling stronger constraints with JSON Schema.

Older articles are available here.

Photos