Overview

For the past few years, I’ve been outsourcing tasks from my daily life whenever possible. I tend to be more limited in time than money, so if paying $30 can save me an hour, I consider that a good deal.

I recently started experimenting with the keto diet, which focuses on low carbs. I’ve had good experience with the diet, but it limits what food delivery I can order, as BBQ, deli sandwiches, pizza, etc. do not fit the diet.

Overview

I started investing in peer to peer lending in 2014 through a site called Prosper. I thought peer to peer lending was a neat idea and could potentially earn lucrative returns.

When I began, I chose each of my loan investments manually, but over time, I have automated this process by building a lending bot called ProsperBot that invests for me automatically.

In this blog post, I’ll give a brief overview of peer to peer lending and walk through the process of building ProsperBot.

Overview

Ansible is an excellent tool for deploying web apps. Ansible allows us to define web apps in terms of the different “roles” that compose our web app (e.g. web server, database server, application server). As our roles and the interactions between them become more complex, we need appropriately stronger ways of testing our roles to verify we’re deploying our web app correctly.

In our last post, we used Ansible to deploy a web app called ClipBucket, a video-hosting web app. In that post, we included automated tests to verify that the web app installed correctly, but these tests did not exercise application functionality very rigorously.

Overview

ClipBucket is an open source video hosting platform, similar in functionality to YouTube or Vimeo. In this guide, we’ll walk through how to deploy ClipBucket to a server using the configuration management tool, Ansible.

tl; dr - Just Install ClipBucket

I don’t care about Ansible or any of your thoughts and feelings about using it to install ClipBucket. Just tell me how to install ClipBucket!

If you came here just looking for an easy way to deploy ClipBucket to a server, the series of commands below will install ClipBucket on a bare Ubuntu 14.04 server with just a few commands:

Overview

Sia is a decentralized, peer-to-peer network for buying and selling computer storage space. If you have extra storage space, Sia allows you to sell it to others who want to store their files on the Sia cloud network.

Hosting a Sia server on your personal laptop or desktop can be challenging. People typically turn off their personal machines at times, or at least reboot them on a regular basis. This present a problem for an application like Sia, as it needs to maintain high availability to serve clients on the network.