In today’s edition of “don’t trust LLMs”, we learn that despite what AI tells you, AWS Backup doesn’t support Cross-Account and Cross-Region backups. It supports Cross-Account copying and Cross-Region copying, but apparently not together. As part of Masset’s Data Protection and Disaster Recovery policies, we determined that having backups separated by both region and OU […]| tylerrussell.dev
I like to keep track of times I’m one of the lucky 10,000. Had such an instance today with the JDK and DNS behavior. Apparently most versions of the JDK cache DNS lookups indefinitely. If that’s not surprising to you, I’m guessing you’ve had a weekend debugging session similar to mine. I can’t be the […]| tylerrussell.dev
Often, when explaining to other devs that Masset uses Kotlin as our primary backend language, I receive inquisitive and questioning faces. “The Android language? On your backend? That seems odd… Have you considered rewriting it in Rust?” 🤨 In response, I’ve often found myself struggling to elaborate what it is that I specifically like about […]| tylerrussell.dev
tldr; I took SSOReady up on their marketing tagline of “SAML in an afternoon”. Overall, it was a positive experience and despite not quite having a production-ready deployment in an afternoon, I think their tagline is a fair approximation of effort. Introduction Enterprise SSO logins are a weird dictomony. Implementing something like OIDC or SAML […]| tylerrussell.dev
As part of the Masset digital asset management platform, we sometimes need to run tasks that take a long time. For example, when someone uploads a video, we may need to resize it to a few different sizes or extract the audio from it. Originally we used AWS Lamdba for this because it allowed dynamic […]| tylerrussell.dev
This is the first post in a two-part series on how Masset identified and removed downtime when deploying it’s React-based Single Page Application (SPA) frontend. TLDR: Container-based static sites suffer from downtime when using rolling deployments. We can use a CDN (Cloudfront in this case) to mitigate the issue and get some fringe benefits in […]| tylerrussell.dev
The age-old adage states that if you win the lottery, keep it a secret. Once it’s public knowledge, the vultures start circling. Unfortunately, after raising a round of funding, you don’t keep it secret. In fact, it often benefits you to shout it from the rooftops. I expected an increase in inbound spam once we […]| tylerrussell.dev
I missed blogging for a few weeks over the holiday season (ie sickness season), but we’re finally back in good health and in the full swing of things again. Coming back, I thought it’d be fun to document Masset’s early tech stack. It’s bound to evolve over time, so tracking that evolution will be fun. […]| tylerrussell.dev
Masset recently closed a round of Pre-Seed funding for 700k! You can read all about it on techbuzz.news who graciously picked up the story. I won’t lie, given the current economic situation, raising anything feels like a great success. I’m extremely grateful to our investors have taken a chance on us. And believed in us […]| tylerrussell.dev
At 5:30 PM on my last day of W2 employment, I wrapped up a final few emails, said a couple last goodbyes and closed my laptop. Then, I sat and stared at two blank monitors for a few moments. “What am I doing?” I thought. “I can’t start a company. Most startups fail. The numbers […]| tylerrussell.dev
Reading Time: 24 minutesOften, when explaining to other devs that Masset uses Kotlin as our primary backend language, I receive inquisitive and questioning faces. “The Android language? On your backend? That seems odd… Have you considered rewriting it in Rust?” 🤨 | tylerrussell.dev