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What I’ve learned from a weekly newsletter

I run a weekly newsletter focused on customer identity and access management (CIAM), and it just hit 53 issues, which means I’ve been writing it for about a year.

Thought I’d share things I’ve learned.

Weekly is a big commitment

Make sure you want to do this.

Writing a post every week is a bit of a grind. However, just like with blog posts, you can batch up newsletter posts. There are some weeks when I write three or four posts and schedule them out. This means that I can regularly take a week or two off.

Scheduling will vary based on your topic, of course. If I were writing a newsletter about news or current events, scheduling wouldn’t work.

But for many topics it’s a great way to keep the content flowing while not being tied to the keyboard every week.

Great way to keep on top of an industry

There’s a reason there are many newsletters with this approach. It’s a way to keep in front of interested readers, but it also forces you to keep on top of the particular industry you are writing about.

Due to the deadlines mentioned above, you’ll be forced to regularly think about new trends, find articles and books, and read people writing about the industry or topic you are writing about.

The corollary to this is to make sure you love the area you are committing to. If I wasn’t interested in CIAM, it would be a lot harder to write it. (Of course, nothing is forever, and when it makes sense, I might wind this newsletter down the same way I’ve stopped other projects.)

Have some way to keep track of good ideas

You never know when inspiration might strike.

I like to mail myself content and ideas that I think might apply. I write ‘for ciam weekly’ somewhere in the message.

Then, when I have time to sit down and write, I can search my email for ‘for ciam weekly’ and see all my proposed topics.

You could do something more organized like having a spreadsheet or a folder, but I feel like this works for my level of commitment.

You have to promote it

You have to promote the newsletter. You can’t expect people to find it. Places I’ve promoted it:

  • Hacker News (here’s a podcast I was on where I talk about how to interact with that site)
  • Various slacks I’m a member of
  • In other substacks (referrals)
  • My LinkedIn and Twitter (often scheduled)

Your list might look different but don’t forget you have to do this.

But. Don’t be a drive by promoter. I don’t post in places I don’t frequent.

You can vary between original articles and commentary

I have written some long form posts, in particular a series about the multiple ways user data gets into a CIAM system.

I have also written commentary, where I look at a blog post about password honeypots or other articles that discuss CIAM topics, and reflect on that content.

Both work fine; varying up the content is a great way to keep things interesting for me and my readers.

It’s a long game

I have 80 subscribers with an open rate that is around 50%. Some might look at that and say “after a year, you only have 80 subscribers” and shake their head.

I look at it and say “there are 80 people who want to read what I have to say about CIAM!? And at least half of them read it!”

Newsletters are powerful because they deliver your thoughts to your readers’ inboxes, but they are a long game, especially when niche.

Don’t just build a backlog, share it too

I have started sharing more blog posts and podcast episodes on Twitter, LinkedIn, email lists, slack channels, and other places. It’s kinda fun to look back over past work and find something that resonates. I’ll often discover this when I’m engaging in a discussion or see a post on a related topic.

This is one of the benefits of blogging. You can lay out your thoughts on a complex subject in detail, considering various points of view before coming to a conclusion. When someone brings up the same subject, you can share your thoughts with a single link copy and paste, rather than retyping all your thoughts.

There’s also value a backlog of stream or podcast guest appearances. Don’t just share the podcast when it first comes out (though you should do so). Share it repeatedly! You and the host had a good conversation, right? Most conversations are just as valuable a year later as it was a day later. Even if you are talking about the news of the day, your analysis should have long term value. And podcast hosts love to see someone share an old episode; it helps raise the profile of their efforts.

I like to use scheduling for some of this backlog highlighting, as that lets me batch i tup.I have successfully scheduled out posts using native tools. Both Twitter and LinkedIn let you schedule posts. Twitter lets you schedule out posts up to 18 months out. LinkedIn is more limited and only lets you schedule out three months. But if you are posting two times a month, that’s still six posts/pieces of content you can share.

Don’t rely entirely on scheduled posts. Engage spontaneously. However, having these posts scheduled means you are still sharing your past work even if you have a busy week or a vacation.

You can highlight a backlog of short form content too. With Twitter, I also do “still true” posts where I retweet one of my posts that I feel is timeless. Here are some examples.

Finally, a public backlog of your thoughts is a great way to show your expertise and growth over the years.

You know who likes to see that?

Employers.

Docker thoughts

Docker is amazing tech for developer productivity.

You can package up the dependencies for your application into one file (a Dockerfile) or more than one file (a docker-compose file). You might use the former for an application or service and the latter if your application depends on a database, cache, or other external architectural component.

I am definitely late to the Docker party, as I remember Eric Norlin interviewing Solomon Hykes in the early 2010s at Gluecon. In 2018 I used it to stand up some consulting projects, but wondered at the value and the required investment.

I’ve recently been using it extensively at work to set up quickstarts. These tutorials let folks stand up our software quickly for evaluation purposes. Docker is a fantastic fit for this use case.

I’ve been a big fan of detailed documentation and readmes for setting up development environments, but Docker takes all that documentation (including tedious things like ‘install python 3.8.12. 3.8.11 doesn’t work’) and puts it into code that is accessible with single command.

I have a foggy memory of detailed readmes, hours of setup and dependency hell, but Docker removes all of that. Doesn’t mean your Docker images/compose files can’t get stale and won’t need love and attention, but it does mean you can control when you test and upgrade such dependencies, rather than discovering it when a new developer comes on the team and can’t get their environment set up.

Shipping software to production via containers (Docker or otherwise) has operational benefits, but I’m less familiar with those. One of the nice things about developer relations is you’re separated a bit from operations. (It’s one of the downsides as well.) I haven’t recently worked with a production system where containers were used, but I have read nice things about the approach. Here’s an article from Google which covers the technical benefits.

What about the licensing? This business model change rocked the world of happy Docker users, but when you take funding, you have to make money. Actually, if you want to survive as a company, you have to make money, but if you take funding, you have to try to make a LOT of money. That’s the game, make sure you know before you start to play. But that’s a different post.

As far as Docker licensing, as a Docker user, you have two options:

  • pay docker when you reach the threshold
  • use a docker alternative such as finch or podman

As the previous paragraph implies, Docker is a subset of containers. The benefits I mention above apply to container based systems, not just Docker systems, but Docker is the solution I’m most familiar with.

Docker, and containerization in general, feels like as big a leap as Stackoverflow, git or memory managed languages in terms of developer productivity.

Protecting a CDN source using basic auth

I have a website that is behind a content delivery network (CDN). I want to protect it from being crawled by any robots. I want all access to go through the CDN for reasons. There may be errant links to the source; I don’t care if they continue to work.

htaccess and basic auth is perfect for this situation.

I added an .htaccess file that looks like this:

AuthType Basic
AuthName "Secure Content"
AuthUserFile /path/to/.htpasswd
require valid-user

I needed to make sure the path and the file are readable by the web server user.

Then, I added a .htpasswd entry that looks like this:

user:passwdvalue

If you don’t have access to htpasswd, the typical program used to generate the password value, this site will generate one for you.

Then, I had to configure my CDN to give it the appropriate header.

Use the Authorization header, and make sure to pass the username and the password. This site will generate the appropriately base64 encoded values.

Voila. Only the CDN has access.

Now, the flaws:

  • Depending on how the CDN accesses the site, it may be possible to snoop out the username and password
  • If you ever want to get the origin site over HTTP, you’ll need the username/password

Setting up password gorilla on an ARM Mac

I love password gorilla. It’s a portable locally hosted password manager that is compatible with passwordsafe. It has all the features I need in a password manager:

  • account groups
  • password generation
  • metadata storage (so you can add a note)
  • keyboard shortcuts for copy and pasting the url, username, and password
  • local storage of secrets

It doesn’t have fancy integration with browsers, remote backup or TOTP, but I don’t need these. For browser integration, I use the clipboard. For remote backup, pwsafe files can be copied anywhere. And for TOTP, the whole point of MFA is that each factor is separate.

But recently, I started setting up an Apple M1 machine, and the password gorilla downloads failed to start. I looked at the github issues of the repository and didn’t find a ton of help, though there were some related issues.

After some poking around, here’s what I did that worked for running password gorilla on my Apple M1:

  • installed tcl-tk using brew: brew install tcl-tk
  • cloned the password gorilla repository: git clone https://github.com/zdia/gorilla.git
  • wrote a small shell script and added the directory where it lived to my path.
#!/bin/sh

cd <cloned repository directory>/sources
/opt/homebrew/opt/tcl-tk/bin/tclsh gorilla.tcl

That’s it. After I did this, I can run this script any time and password gorilla starts right up.

GitHub Actions Are Amazingly Easy

GitHub Workflows are automated jobs that can be triggered by various events against a GitHub repository. They are pretty awesome.

GitHub Actions are a way to encapsulate configuration and functionality in a way that can be easily reused in GitHub Workflows.

I was thinking it’d be fun to create some GitHub Actions (yes, I’m the life of the party), so I sat down a few mornings ago to do this. I was shocked at how easy it was.

I followed a few lines of this tutorial to create a workflow. Then I created an action by following this tutorial. Finally, I edited my workflow to use the new action. That was it.

It was amazingly simple and took me about 30 minutes. I ran into one unrelated issue (to set the executable bit on a shell script in windows, I had to modify the shell script contents in order to ensure the change was sent to the remote repo).

If you take a look, you’ll see these are both toy repositories, to be sure. However, the ability to write jobs which will be executed on a git push, pull request or other events is great and removes toil. Being able to extract common functionality to an action is even better. Finally, the ability to share the action publicly by adding it to the GitHub marketplace is fantastic.

I’ve liked CircleCI for a long time, but if I were them I’d be worried.

One issue I found is that the testing/release cycle is pretty tedious (I’ve mentioned that action debugging to be an issue for a while).

While I was troubleshooting my executable bit error, I had to do the following every time I wanted to test a change:

  • make a change in the action repository
  • create a new tag
  • push it to the remote
  • switch to the workflow repository
  • bump the action version
  • push to the remote
  • wait for the workflow to complete

Not horrific, but pretty tedious. I don’t know if there are other options such as local deployment which would reduce that cycle, but that would be swell.

Other than that, 10 out of 10, would write more actions.

Collecting internet points

I’ve been pretty active on HackerNews for the last couple of years and recently made it into the top 100 posters. According to this stats page, in just over 10 years as a member, I’ve posted 3468 comments and had 7824 submissions. That is approximately 1 comment and 2 posts per day, for a decade. (The numbers are as of the time I write this post.)

That’s a lot of hours on a site.

In light of that effort, I’d like to reflect on the good, the bad and the ugly of my years on HN, collecting karma points.

The good:

  • It’s elevated worthwhile posts and sites. I don’t know a single better source of free traffic for technical content. You don’t just get the initial traffic; other sites, online communities and newsletters pick up top ranked HN posts and reshare them, so there’s an echo effect as well that lasts for weeks. It is really fun to find a good article, post it and surprise the author.
  • I’ve learned a lot by reading the comments, especially in fields outside of software engineering. Posts on topics such as economics, physics and careers all receive really insightful comments.
  • I’ve been able to help a few folks get jobs by posting on HN. They have a monthly free jobs board and I know at least two people who have been hired because of one of my posts on the jobs board.
  • While trending on HN doesn’t typically translate directly to sales, it is great for brand awareness. At my current job, quite a few sales processes have been started because an engineer read a post about FusionAuth on HN.
  • For a developer relations position, having an active presence on HN is helpful. You can certainly devrel without being on HN, just like you can devrel without being on Twitter. But in general a public profile is helpful.

The bad:

  • While most folks argue and discuss from a place of goodwill, there are some who are overly pedantic and or just not nice. I can ignore them, but I remember a few flushes of shame where I made a mistake in a comment and was called out on it in an unkind, direct manner.
  • Self-promotion is part and parcel of a community where there’s this much traffic (to be transparent I promote my own stuff, but only 1 out of 10 posts at most). Often, I’ve seen over the top self-promotion. If someone only posts their own content, it simply doesn’t work.

The ugly:

  • HN has its share of trolls. I have personally seen fewer ugly posts recently, but any time I mention HN, folks reflect on the ugly, mean comments they’ve encountered on the site. Here’s an example of some people’s feelings.
  • I’ve had people ask me not to post their content without warning them. This is because of the kind of feedback they get from the site; they want to mentally prepare. That they’d even feel the need to do that is icky.

I think finding a community or three is a key part of growing as a developer.

While HN is not perfect nor it is as welcoming as other communities like the one around the Ruby language, the breadth and volume and diversity of it has been helpful to me.

So, I plan to keep collecting internet points for the coming years.

Thoughts on managing a devtools forum

I’m one of the team members tasked with managing the FusionAuth community forum, where folks using FusionAuth who don’t have a paid support plan can find help and answers.

Here’s some advice for running such a forum. (I wrote previously about why you should use a forum rather than Slack/Discord/live chat.)
  • First, consider why are you going to run a forum? Lots of great reasons: ease a support burden, help with SEO, foster community, get product feedback. Get clear on what you are trying to build before committing, because it is a commitment.
  • Choose forum software carefully. Migration will be a pain. Common options include nodebb (what we use), discourse, and vanilla forums.
  • Seed the forum. This means gathering up questions as you see them pop up in other venues (support tickets, GitHub issues, customer calls). I did that religiously for a few months. I learned a lot about the product and the forum posts meant that folks were helped even when it was new. I’d recommend posting the question and then responding in-thread with an answer.
  • Forums will bubble up commonly asked questions. This can tell you where your docs should be improved.
  • You must groom the forum. It won’t be set and forget. You have to pay attention to it, answer questions, respond to responses. A forum full of unanswered questions is worse than no forum at all. Trust me, developers will notice (we’ve had customers mention that they appreciated how active our forum was).
  • Because we sell support, we don’t answer questions immediately or have engineering staff answer them. There are also questions that we can’t answer such as architecture recommendations. Immediate responses and answers requiring context and research are reserved for paying customers. This hurts my heart some times, but we are open about it. May not be applicable to in all cases.
  • Don’t be afraid to ban users. We ban anyone who spams, no questions asked. Delete the content and ban the user. We luckily haven’t had any abuse issues beyond spam.
  • Have a code of conduct. I grabbed GitHub’s (you can see ours here, and here’s GitHub’s)  but have something. We didn’t in the early days, but it’s a good thing to have out of the gate.
  • Don’t expect a lot of community to grow out of it. At least, I haven’t had that experience, most people just want their questions answered. May be because I’m extremely part time on it and haven’t fostered it, though. Slack/discord is much more likely to build community in my experience. But know what your users want: Google or Facebook?
  • At a certain point, I had to enable a post queue, where a team member approves every new user. We were getting a lot of spam accounts and then they’d post gambling ads and then direct a ton of traffic (1000s of pageviews) to the ads. I don’t know what the spammer endgame was, but approving each new post has solved the issue. I’d definitely look for that feature.
In general I love forums, and so do devs, but they do take some work.

How to be a good conference talk audience member

I recently attended a conference and was both a speaker and audience member. It was on the smaller side; there were probably a few hundred attendees and the audiences ranged from about twenty to hundreds of attendees for the keynotes.

After one of the talks, a speaker came up and said “you were such a good audience member, thank you!”. I said the same thing to one of the attendees of the talk I gave.

I wanted to share how you can be a good audience member at a conference talk. It’s important to note that this advice is for attending in-person talks where the speaker can see the audience. This is typically when there are up to one hundred people. I’ve spoken in front of 800 people and it’s a different experience. While some of these principles apply, in general individual behavior is less important as audience size grows.

And online talks are an entirely different experience for everyone, both audience and speaker! I don’t have enough experience to give any advice for that scenario.

First, though, why would you care to be a good member of an in-person audience? After all, you are providing your time and money to the conference and the presenter. Isn’t it the speaker’s job to entertain and educate you? Why would you expend any energy to help them do so?

First, I’m a big fan of being respectful of other human beings and helping them succeed. Public speaking is a common fear and being a good audience member can reassure the speaker and reduce that fear. It’s hard up there, whether it’s your first talk or your hundredth.

The second reason is that you can make a talk better for yourself. You can learn more and you can tune their presentation to your needs. They are an expert and you can take advantage of their expertise.

So, here are my tips on how to be a great audience member:

  • First, remember that you don’t owe the speaker your time, but you do owe them respect. If you aren’t interested in the talk, if it isn’t what you thought it would be, or if you have another commitment or pressing issue to address, leave the room. Don’t make a big show of it, but get up, walk quietly to the door, open it carefully, and depart.
  • Since you’ve decided to stay, pay attention. Silence your phone. Turn off your computer. If you want to take notes using your laptop, disable wifi so you won’t be distracted.
  • When you understand and agree with something, nod and smile. This feedback provides the speaker a signal that they are reaching you.
  • If you don’t understand, frown or make a questioning face. No need to harumph, but give the presenter feedback that the topic is confusing or that they haven’t made their point clearly.
  • If you have questions, ask them. Speakers should inform you if they want to be interrupted with questions during the talk up front, but if they haven’t, a polite hand raise should be acknowledged. If it isn’t, save your questions for the end.
  • When asking questions, realize you may not get a complete, satisfactory answer. If you don’t, I’d avoid a secondary question. Instead approach the speaker after for a more in-depth discussion.
  • If you didn’t like or understand the talk, give that feedback to the speaker afterwards. No need to be rude, but saying something like “I wish you’d given more background on <X>” or “It seemed like you skipped over the complexities with <Y>” will help the speaker improve their talk.
  • If you feel moved to do so, thank the speaker afterwards. This is not required but a talk is a lot of work and any feedback is usually welcomed.

Am I always a good audience member? Nope.

I get distracted sometimes.

But when I follow my suggestions above, I learn more from the expert on the stage.

Ask for no, don’t ask for yes

I think it is important to have a bias for action. Like anything else, this is something you can make a habit of. Moving forward allows you to make progress. I don’t know about you, but I’ve frozen up in the past not knowing what the right path was for me. Moving forward, even the smallest possible step, helped break that stasis.

One habit I like is to ask for no, not yes. Note that this is based on my experience at small companies (< 200 employees) where a lot of my experience has been. I’m not sure how it’d work in a big company, non-profit, or government.

When you have something you want to do and that you feel is in scope for your position, but you want a bit of reassurance or to let the boss know what you are up to, it’s common to reach out and ask them for permission. Don’t. Don’t ask for a yes. Instead, offer a chance to say no, but with a deadline.

Let’s see how this works.

Suppose I want to set up a new GitHub action that I feel will really improve the quality of our software. This isn’t whimsy, I’ve done some research and tested it locally. I may have even asked a former colleague how they used this GitHub action.

But I’m not quite sure. I want to let my boss know that I’ll be modifying the repository.

I could say “hey, boss, can we install action X? It’ll help with the XYZ problems we’ve been having.”

If you have a busy boss (and most people do), this is going to require a bit of work on their part to say “yes”.

They’ll want to review the XYZ problem, think about how X will solve it and maybe do some thinking or prioritization about how this fits in with other work. Or maybe they’ll want you to share what you know. It may fall off their plate. You will probably have to remind them a few times to get around to saying “yes”. It might be a more pressing issue for you

Now, let’s take the alternative approach.”Hey, boss, I am going to install action X, which should solve the XYZ problems we’ve been having. Will take care of this on Monday unless I hear differently from you.”

Do you see the change in tone?

You are saying (without being explicit) that you “got it” and are going to handle this issue. The boss can still weigh in if they want to, but they don’t have to. If they forget about it or other issues pop up, you still proceed. This lets you keep moving forward and solving problems while keeping the boss informed and allowing them to add their two cents if it is important enough.

You can also use this approach with a group of people.

By the way, the deadline is critical too. Which would you respond to more quickly, if it was Jan 15, all other things being equal and assuming a response was needed?

  • “I’m going to do task X.”
  • “I’m going to do task X on Jan 17.”
  • “I’m going to do task X on Feb 15.”

I would respond to the second one, which has a deadline in the near future. I think that is the way most folks work.

Again, pursue this approach for problems you feel are in the scope of your role but that you want to inform the boss about. It’s great when you want to offer a chance for feedback, but you are confident enough in the course of action that you don’t need feedback.