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Showing posts from July, 2020

Metal Commando - Primal Fear

I've had much anticipation for this release and I wasn't disappointed. While it lacks the epic nature of Severn Seals and New Religion until the final (13 minute!) track, it's packed full of solid power metal songs. Unlike most albums, I found it instantly enjoyable on first listen. Other than the lack of epicness, my only complaint would be it's rather short. I'm fully expecting this to become one of my favourite albums of 2020. Metal Commando

Greenback backup

Why When Naked Element was still a thing, we used DigitalOcean almost exclusively for our client’s hosting. For the sorts of projects we were doing it was the most straightforward and cost effective solution. DigitalOcean provided managed databases, but there was no facility to automatically back them up. This led us to develop a Python based program which was triggered once a day to perform the backup, push it to AWS S3 and send a confirmation or failure email. We used Python due to familiarity, ease of use and low installation dependencies. I’ll demonstrate this later on in the Dockerfile. S3 was used for storage as DigitalOcean did not have their equivalent, ‘Spaces’, available in their UK data centre. The closest is in Amsterdam, but our clients preferred to have their data in the UK.  Fast forward to May 2020 and I’m working on a personal project which uses a PostgreSQL database. I tried to use a combination of AWS and Terraform  for the project’s infrastructure (as