Getting your application’s data into a common data warehouse in order to do various reporting or business intelligence work is pretty common and also pretty useful. I often reach for Google’s BigQuery product for this since their web UI and simple connections to reporting are easy for others to use out of the box. BigQuery is also widely supported in various other tools such as Metabase which makes it even easier for self-service analytics for your team.

When I was working at SXSW I built a simple deployment dashboard status tool as a way to keep track of the dozens of applications getting deployed on a daily and weekly basis. It was a quick and simple way for the team to see when something was last deployed, what changes went out with that deploy, what changes are waiting to go out, who actually deployed last, and a few other details. We called it Ketchup, as in to catch up on what has and hasn’t been deployed. The name was cleverly lifted from the Ketchup line in Pulp Fiction, kudos to Mike for that one.

MRSK is a great leap forward in the container management and orchestration world. It’s a simple and fast approach to easily managing containers on whatever cloud or hardware you want to run your applications on. In the MRSK demo video DHH utilizes Digital Ocean and Hetzner to setup the infrastructure that he eventually deploys to and it’s really just a few clicks in the relevant hosting dashboard, easy peasy. I went through the same dashboard setup to get my first MRSK project deployed but then figured I’d codify into Terraform so that it’s easy to get started with a new project or to start working on migrating an existing project.

I recently starting using the new Arc browser and it’s actually been really great. It seemed like a stretch that it was really a new browser experience but it really is.

I’ve been working on automating more and more these days and a common issue I keep dealing with is mapping data from one platform to another within Zapier. I have a user or project that exists in the one system that needs to go to the right place in the other system.

Zapier has lookup tables but you have to add every single possible match manually, you can’t easily populate the key to lookup via a previous data source. I figured it was a good time to come up with a simple pattern and figured I’d share it.