Zachary Hughes

A developer’s perspective

  • Fixing a bug in one of our deployment pipelines

    At work, I maintain and develop a suite of microservices that make up an enterprise IoT management platform. All of the different services are deployed using Terraform into Kubernetes clusters. We have a few different cronjobs we run to take care of certain tasks that need to place regularly. Earlier, we noticed a Github Actions…

  • Migrating terraform remote state

    Our team has been managing our deployments with Terraform for a few years now. We have a ton of deployed resources stored in a state file on Azure. We decided to move our terraform code that actually deploys services to the repository in which the source code lives, instead of a dedicated repository for these…

  • Setting up Google Analytics with WordPress

    SSH into your instance and go to your where you have WordPress installed. For me, this was /var/www/html. From here, I found the theme that I was using at /wp-content/themes/twentytwentythree. To add some additional scripts into the HTML head element, we have to add an add_action command to functions.php. This file should be at the…

  • Writing better main func’s in Go

    As software engineers, it feels great to roll out a functionally correct codebase that solves a business problem. It is a milestone in ones career when they develop enough experience to become confident enough in the business domain, programming language and/or tools to solve anything asked of them. This is where I was at the…

  • How to Deploy WordPress For Free

    So I’ve been keeping this little WordPress blog site on my local laptop using MAMP for the last couple of months. Yesterday, I finally found the time to deploy it using the domain name I’ve owned for years (and that hasn’t been active for at least 2). I wanted to see if the AWS Free…

  • Electric Vehicles

    For the last six months, I’ve had the pleasure of taking part in a leadership program called SD Achieve at work. During this time, we’ve had speakers come in to talk about different lessons in leadership, while working in a group of six on a business strategy project. As a software engineer, this gave me…

  • Code Review, Key Vault client, part 3

    Ok, at this point, we are in a much better place. Our code is unit tested and working as we expected. But there is still a higher level to ascribe to – that of the principal engineer. That grizzled veteran, who has been around the many times and understands that working code is good, but…

  • Code Review: Key Vault client, part 2

    A senior engineer would look at this initial implementation in part one and realize it needs unit tests. To unit test properly, we will also need mocks. First things first, let’s add the interface we need to test the key vaults and do a light refactor on the initial Azure Key Vault code. Next up,…

  • Code Review: Key Vault client, part 1

    This week, I spent some time developing an internal library for storing, reading and deleting customer secrets. We opted to use Azure Key Vault for this. They provide a Golang SDK for interacting with the service for secret management. A junior engineer could write something like the following. Bonus points, if they actually have the…

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