Articles by Sean Conroy

Uncategorized February 18, 2019

Creating CLI Utilities with Python

If you do any sort of automation, you have probably done a fair amount of work using the CLI on your computer.   This is applicable regardless of platform. If you use Python you might have asked yourself how you could start making your own command line utilities to help you in your daily tasks.  That very question is the topic of todays article. We will start by discussing how to get your python applications without having to type python at the beginning.  Then we will discuss how to properly Read more […]

Uncategorized February 11, 2019

How to Autoscale your wordpress site on AWS

WordPress is a very popular platform for running websites.  I have read reports of wordpress hosting up to 27% of websites.   With wordpress powering so much of the web, you might be asking yourself how you can design your website to run on wordpress. There are many wordpress hosting sites out there that you can use.  That is the easiest solution for you to take. But for one reason or another, you might want to host your own wordpress site instead of relying on someone else for hosting. The Read more […]

Girl using computer and writing on notepad

Programming, Python, Uncategorized January 28, 2019

What is the python requirements.txt?

If you have browsed any python projects on Github or elsewhere, you have probably noticed a file called requirements.txt  This requirements.txt file is used for specifying what python packages are required to run the project you are looking at.  Typically the requirements.txt file is located in the root directory of your project. If you open a requirements.txt file, you will see something that looks simiar to this: pyOpenSSL==0.13.1 pyparsing==2.0.1 python-dateutil==1.5 pytz==2013.7 scipy==0.13.0b1 six==1.4.1 virtualenv==16.3.0 Notice Read more […]

Red apple sitting on wooden picnic table

Python January 27, 2019

Troubleshooting Python on MacOS

MacOS ships with Python 2.7 Pre-installed. This is helpful when you are just getting started with Python since you can just start using it with no setup. Unfortunately Python 2.7 is going out of support in 2020, so we all need to get to upgrading to Python 3. When you start upgrading Python, there is a good chance that Python will get messed up on your computer. This article wil help you troubleshoot and solve some of the issues you might encounter as you start moving to Python 3.X on MacOS. Preventing Read more […]

Cloud September 24, 2018

What is hybrid cloud?

Moving stuff to the cloud has been all the rage the last few years. And for many situations that is the right thing to do. Especially when you are working on a Greenfield project where you can design everything from scratch. However, in many organizations you have applications and servers that cannot or should not be run in the cloud. Today I will attempt to answer two questions: What is Hybrid Cloud? When would you use a hybrid cloud approach? What is the cloud? Before we start talking about Read more […]

Python September 16, 2018

Python Unit Testing using pytest

Unit testing is the act of testing a small unit of your code. Generally this means you are tesitng a function or a class in isolation. If you are doing this unit testing manually, you simply run your function, then check and make sure it gave you the expected output. This is what you have been manually doing ever since you first started writing software.As your software projects grow larger, this manual testing becomes less feasible. And you might start missing things that you would have caught during Read more […]

Cloud July 28, 2018

What is the Cloud?

For the last few years, the word Cloud has been used a lot. It seems as though everyone has latched onto this word cloud. But what does the cloud really mean? My definition of the cloud is the internet. A cloud service would be a service that is hosted by someone else and you access it over the internet. These cloud services can make many different forms, and I will cover a few of them today. There are three main offerings when you are considering cloud services: IAAS — Infrastructure as Read more […]

Software Development July 4, 2018

What is Agile Development?

Agile is a set of principles that developers can follow to be more effective in developing their software. The whole thing started with a set of principles that were developed by a group of industry leaders back in 2001. Given that Agile is a set of principles, it is more guidelines vs strict rules to follow. If you review the set of principles, and later the agile frameworks, the biggest take away is to focus on short iterations of work. Always focus on delivering value in each iteration. You can Read more […]

Python July 4, 2018

Python data types explained

In python, almost everything is an object. This includes variables like String and Integers and containers like lists and dictionaries. Given that everything is an object, what are data types? Data types are simply how you classify your objects. If you have a an object with the type of String, then that object will have all of the string properties and functions. If you have an object with a type of integer, then that object will have all the applicable properties and functions associated with integers. Given Read more […]

Netapp, Uncategorized June 24, 2018

Working with Netapp Support

I have spent a lot of time with various vendors support departments; and I have to say, Netapp has one of the best support departments.  If I call Netapp at 2:00 AM on a Sunday morning, I can get someone on the phone right away.  My one complaint is that I cannot open a ticket via E-Mail.  Fortunately that is not a big hurdle to cross. When you are working with Netapp support you can either open a ticket over the phone or via the Now website.  If you do not have a NOW login, I would Read more […]