How to secure your Raspberry Pi and enable safe, resilient updates

TL;DR The venerable Raspberry Pi has been around for over a decade (officially created in 2009) and it has become a standard in many robotics, home automation, and other types of uses. Especially for “makers” and other tinkerers. But it has also made serious inroads into the professional and enterprise world – just more quietly. It’s a capable, reliable, and powerful Single Board Computer (SBC) with a robust user community. For all it’s strengths, it does have a few notable weaknesses.

Reading Time: 22 minutes

October 21, 2024 Read
Yet Another Job

Wait, what?!? I know, I know, it seems like I’ve been changing jobs a lot lately. So much so that I haven’t even written posts about some of them. Note: This has always been one of my favorite New Yorker cartoons from way back in the day when I lived in NYC. In the 1980s, this was a real phenomenon on the Upper West Side. It’s been a very difficult time for the industry, for DevRel in particular, and for me individually.

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October 16, 2024 Read
How to avoid bricking your raspberry pi during updates

Having an update brick (render inoperable) your device is a real risk, and even the largest of companies have been known to have it happen. This has just happened to Apple (Apple pauses iPadOS 18 rollout for M4 iPad Pro after bricking complaints) and I think we’re all well aware of the Crowdstrike incident by now. It’s such an issue that, given the recent disasters with update rollouts (which I wrote about briefly here) it seemed like a good topic to dive into.

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October 16, 2024 Read
Devrel Is a Party (no it's not)

I’ve been interviewing a lot lately (and no, I don’t want to talk about it). I’m asked almost all the time “How do you define Developer Relations?” and this post is the long-form answer to that question. I’m writing it because almost every interviewer I’ve given this to has said some form of “that’s a really good analogy! You should write that up as a blog post.” So here we are.

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February 7, 2024 Read
About the Archives

Archival posts Over time I have written a lot of content for a variety of employers, publishers, etc. and, while those folks may (or may not) still have that content available I wanted to make sure that I preserved it here for myself. I have a lot of content that I am proud of and I want to make sure that I can find it again. 2019 2018 Monitoring Wireless Interfaces 2017 ThingMonk 2017 Zero to Awesome with InfluxDB Use InfluxDB to Measure Discourse Architechting InfluxDB for Data Downsampling

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November 14, 2022 Read
Measuring and Monitoring Community Engagement on Discourse with InfluxDB

This post was originally published on InfluxData’s Blog Monitoring Discourse We here at InfluxData use Discourse for our Community (you’re a member of our Community, right? No? Well, go sign up!!) Part of my job here at InfluxData is to keep my eye on the community, answer questions, and work to grow the community. And part of that, of course, is metrics. It always comes down to what you can measure, doesn’t it?

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November 3, 2022 Read
Moving On

I know it may seem like this happens all the time, but I’ve left Camunda and started a new position. (I’ll get to where in a minute.) Though it may seem from this, and this that I change jobs all the time, that’s not entirely true. Earlier in my career, things were very different. I worked at Sun Microsystems (a moment of silence, as always) for 15 years and, had Oracle not bought them, I’d likely still be there.

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August 24, 2022 Read
Using TLS to POST from ESP-32 to a Cloudflare service

Arduino HTTPClient Failure I don’t know if anyone else has ever tried this, but I just spent the better part of a week trying to debug this little problem, so I thought maybe I’d save someone some time. I was trying to use WiFiClientSecure along with HTTPClient to POST to an authentication server that is fronted by cloudflare. No matter what I did, I got error messages. I was sending a JSON payload, and it kept telling me that the parameters weren’t in the JSON.

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April 8, 2022 Read
Moving to Camunda Cloud

Some background I’ve written a bit about using Camunda to do all sorts of things from automating IoT processes to helping with the management of a Slack community. Ok, so I haven’t written about all of those things, but I’ve certainly done them. In all of those projects I’ve used Camunda Platform 7 to deploy and run my processes, but most of the actual work was done by external tasks which I wrote in Golang.

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March 24, 2022 Read
An Automated IoT Greenhouse with Camunda

Note: Originally published on DZone so don’t forget to give it some ❤️ over there! Running this project Clone the repository cd into the project directory: Deploy the co2.bpmn process definition to your Camunda server cd into the task-worker directory: run go mod tidy to update the task-worker module adjust all constant values in the task-handler.go file run go run task-handler.go cd into the arduino-code directory open the Greenhouse.ino file in the Arduino IDE adjust all constant values in Greenhouse.

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March 15, 2022 Read
A Time Translation Library for Golang

I can safely say that I’ve never done this before, but it’s been really fun to do (and surprisingly quick, but I’ll get to that.) What’s ’this’? I wrote a Go module. Wait, what? Yep, I wrote a complete Go module that does nearly instantaneous translations for aspects of time – like months, days of the week, etc. Doesn’t Go provide internationalization? The short answer: No. The slightly longer answer: No, it doesn’t.

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September 29, 2021 Read
Automating IoT With Camunda

Some Background When I first started at Camunda back in October, 2020 (what was 2020 anyway?) the very first thing I was asked to do was come up with something I could do for a special Halloween blog post. It being COVID-times, I of course built a Camunda and IoT integration to evaluate costumes and deliver candy. I am sort of well-known for doing weird, pointless IoT projects like this one and this one, and this one.

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August 4, 2021 Read