Harry Bailey

Agency focused strategist, Agile coach and champion of humans

Offboarding as a priority

There is nothing quite like the heart sinking feeling other team members get when a developer announces they’ll be leaving a small team.

Mild panic sets in, and everybody looks to each other for reassurance. Yet that moment is the right time to switch mindsets to focused offboarding. Ensuring the remaining members are left in the best state possible to continue their great work.

Team size is critical here. One developer leaving a team of five often has a huge impact relative to a developer leaving a team of 20. Small teams need to run offboarding in a way that acknowledges this size frailty and mitigates the short and long term risks associated with developer churn.

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Fuelling Your Team

What we eat plays an important role in our ability to focus. Our choices around what and when we eat and drink affects our productivity, energy and general mood. It directly impacts the quality and quantity of our output at work. It compounds within small teams and has an even greater effect.

It’s been shown that those who form new habits around drinking plenty of water and eating the right foods see a better version of themselves within just a few days. Measurably better.

These simple insights into diet aren’t new information though. Most people are already aware that more water, less salt and less sugar are recommended for health and mood. People don’t do their body damage intentionally, but through choosing the path of least resistance when it comes to workplace food and drink habits.

The moral dilemma is of course, do we have any right influencing these choices and the diets of those we work with?

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Setting up Google 2FA using an app not SMS

Google appear to be intentionally hiding the option to use an authenticator app such as Google Authenticator, 1Password and LastPass to store and generate 2FA codes for your Google Account login.

You can use them, but it’s not clear how, and you have to temporarily submit a mobile number you have access to before you’ll find the option available to you.

  • Head to manage your account.
  • Choose to add 2FA
  • Select to do it via SMS
  • Submit your number
  • Enter the code they send you
  • On the next screen select to add an authenticator app
  • Follow the steps and submit the code you can now access
  • View the backup codes and store them somewhere safely
  • Finally you can remove your mobile number from the list of option

So to not use your mobile number and SMS (which is vulnerable to hijacking) you first have to submit your mobile number ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Command Line creation of DNS ‘A’ Record in AWS Route53

If you need to add a new record to a Route53 hosted Zone it can be clunky to log in, browse to the right place and manually add your record each time.

If you’re already using some elements of aws or eb command line functionality then this might just be a small step for you which simplifies a currently manual process.

The aws route53 tools are far more powerful than I will cover here. You could add multiple records in a single request. You could updated existing records, or even toggle certain records.

Hopefully this article and the links are enough to get you on your way.

Now the guides generally tell you to create and use a .json file to pull in your config when running the command line, but where the command is simple and you might want to document it, or share it, it’s easier if the whole thing is a single line. If you want to use a .json file then check out the AWS docs for that.

My initial need was to add a single new subdomain to a domain which has many records. Rather than log in and add the record each time, now it’s part of a flow of other command line requests and means less context switching. Opening a browser for any reason can lead to distraction.

I am however not adding a standard ‘A’ record. I’m actually pointing to an Application Load Balancer so I’ll show you the differences for that below.

The first thing you’ll need to do is confirm you have aws command line tools set up and with permissions for the account you’ll be making changes for. Confirmed? Continue…

aws route53 list-hosted-zones

Find the relevent zone in the list and make a note of the final part of the Id from the last forward slash.

Now we’re going to CREATE in our examples but you can also DELETE or UPSERT (update if exists, insert otherwise).

You can also CREATE all sorts of other records, but we’ll stick to ‘A’ for now as it’s a pretty popular record to add.

Take the following and replace the hosted zone id with the code part taken from above after the forward slash. Replace the domain name with yours, replace the subdomain with the one you want to add.

aws route53 change-resource-record-sets --hosted-zone-id BD55*****RS2 --change-batch '{"Changes": [{"Action": "CREATE","ResourceRecordSet": {"Name": "example.com","Type":"A","ResourceRecords": [{"Value": "subdomain.example.com"}]}]}'

And then run it. You can optionally add a comment, TTL and other details. See the docs for that.

Hopefully if you got the zone id right and the details in the right place, you’ll now have a new record in your route53. You can check with:

aws route53 list-resource-record-sets --hosted-zone-id BD55*****RS2

Aliases

If you want to point to an Alias—for example to point to a load balancer—you’ll first need to confirm the details of the loadbalancer to point to.

Here we’re specifically looking for the ‘hosted zone id’ and the ‘DNS Name’.

aws elbv2 describe-load-balancers --region [The Region]

… switch out the region above first. You should then be shown a list of your load balancers. Match the one you need to point to by its code. I actually looked at my existing DNS records to find that using the list-resource-record-sets method above. Then copy the Hosted Zone ID and the DNS Name for it somewhere safe.

The code when an alias is involved contains little more information. In the following you’ll need to replace…

  • the hosted-zone-id with that of your domain
  • the HostedZoneId with that of your load balancer
  • the domain Name
  • the DNSName of your load balancer
  • the true / false value for EvaluateTargetHealth
aws route53 change-resource-record-sets --hosted-zone-id BD55*****RS2 --change-batch '{"Changes": [{"Action": "CREATE","ResourceRecordSet":{"Name": "subdomain.example.com","Type": "A","AliasTarget":{"HostedZoneId":"AC22*****UE7","DNSName": "dualstack.awseb-awseb-Lptg*****fDJ-203*****13.eu-west-1.elb.amazonaws.com","EvaluateTargetHealth": false}}}]}'

Run the above and you’ll be shown basic details about the new record. Again you can run the list-resource-record-sets line above to confirm it’s been created.

Hopefully that’s enough to get you started and you can move on to other options using the official AWS docs. You can also put batches of changes into a .json file if you’d like to CREATE multiple records at a time.