Automation

Investigate problems due to User-Agent using Bash

Last week we had some problems with the Google Ads bot. It was not able to crawl a bunch of URLs while the browser had no problem getting through. The only difference was the User-Agent. This send us on a debugging journey through Cloudflare, gateways and micro-sites. To assist us, we’ve created a small bash script to visit an URL and show some debug info.

Trigger Lambda for large S3 Bucket with SQS

At Wehkamp we use AWS Lambda to classify images on S3. The Lambda is triggered when a new image is uploaded to the S3 bucket. Currently we have over 6.400.000 images in the bucket. Now we would like to run the Lambda for all images of the bucket. In this blog I’ll show how we did this with a Python 3.6 script.

Convert JsFiddle to SVG using Node.js

I love SVG, but sometimes they are hard to create, especially when you need to visualize diagrams. HTML is way easier to program. So why not combine them? Can we use HTML to generate an SVG? And can we use JsFiddle to generate that HTML?

AWS Lambda Size: PIL+TF+Keras+Numpy?

At Wehkamp we’ve been using machine learning for a while now. We’re training models in Databricks (Spark) and Keras. This produces a Keras file that we use to make the actual predictions. Training is one thing, but getting them to production is quite another!

The main problem we’ve faced was that it was too big to actually fit into a lambda. This blogs shows how we’ve dealt with that problem.

Installing Ubuntu to Windows Server 2019 (WSL)

These scripts will help to install Ubuntu to a Windows Server 2019 installation. It will download Ubuntu and activate the Linux Subsystem on Windows (WSL).

Fixing “white” screen Windows 10 start search

I’ve been having some problems with the search feature of Windows 10. It suddenly stopped working. I don’t exactly know when or why, but it did not come back by turning the computer on and off again. Reinstalling Cortana worked for me.

Finetuning screen brightness with PowerShell

When I work in a low-light environment I like to have fine-grained control over the brightness of my monitor. When I change the brightness using the special function keys on my keyboard, it changes in steps of 10%! That’s a lot. PowerShell to the rescue!

Generate XML with attributes using PowerShell

Today I discovered that generating XML with PowerShell isn’t as straight forward as I had hoped. I started off with a CSV that I had to convert to XML. Fortunately PowerShell is very good when it comes to CSV. It was the parsing of the object to XML-attributes that proved the most challenging part.

Building an updatable Slack message

Slack is fully awesome. At Wehkamp we use it for our internal communication and as a tool for our DevOps. The Slack API allows us to build even more advanced integrations. In this blog I’ll explore how to use the API to create powerful progress indicators by updating a Slack message.

Jump-starting Slack bot projects: bot-zero

To give teams a jump start we’ve created the bot-zero open source project. It solves some setup and development problems. In this blog I’ll show how to get up and running in minutes and I’ll explain some of the choices we’ve made.