This Week’s Program: May 30 - June 3

🎉 Nine years ago today, the incredible Vera agreed to be my wife! She is the most wonderful, supportive, caring, funny, thoughtful, beautiful friend that I could ever ask for. I’m forever grateful that she’s stuck with me from one wacky scheme and head-scratching distraction to the next. She’s my muse and my ghostwriter. No newsletter author could ask for a better subscriber. No man could ask for a better partner. Hi my love! Happy anniversary! 💟

I’ll keep this brief.

I took Memorial Day off from writing code; the long weekend helped me refocus on this next stage of sonic-sketches. I’ve so enjoyed writing in Clojure, and it’s been hard to accept that what I really need to do is shift gears away from the musical exploration of sonic-sketches and approach this next stage of development as something new. It’s time for me to better understand the Infrastructure as Code movement.

I spent some time over the long weekend getting a stronger footing with EC2 and the kind of thing Packer is really suited for. Choosing Packer might have been an overcorrection, but in any case I spent this week tangling with AMI creation. Following last week, my Packer build failed.

94c3c65f778782b12571a1751c11ff64124f5b41

This changes the Packer source AMI to pull use Ubuntu 12.04 Precise Pangolin. The original AMI was Ubuntu 14.04 Trusty Tahr. My build was failing because my provisioning script is shared with my Vagrantfile. My Vagrant box builds from Precise. When that provisioning script runs against Trusty, it just doesn’t work. Packages are different. Wanting to keep this symmetry between Vagrant and EC2, I decided to stick with what I knew worked and move the AMI onto Precise.

After the Packer build step completes, I have an AMI that I could spin up into an EC2 instance, ssh in, and verify that all the dependencies are there. Next, I’ll be evaluating AWS CodeDeploy to see how to get my code from GitHub onto my EC2 box and have its dependencies set up and ready to go.

4a632ba9da1060823f97356f344dcfdec599fe75

I also did some work in a separate track from my Packer and IaC explorations. In this commit, I brought the ClojureScript compiler into the project.

c3285728b50a202537ac67a9118853e76bc3a344

Then, I brought in the lein-cljsbuild plugin and set it up to compile an empty ClojureScript file.

Why am I bringing in ClojureScript? Because I know at some point I’ll want to do some work within AWS Lambda. I think I’d like to have that code live alongside the sonic-sketches repo. I’d love to write AWS Lambda functions in ClojureScript and deploy them as JS. I’m taking this slow.

That’s all for now. Have a fantastic weekend!

– Mark