Roy Lines : Consultant CTO, Cloud Architect and Devops specialist

AWS Management using Terraform and CircleCI

I’ve been using Hashicorp’s Terraform to provision AWS infrastructure for a while now. It has a nicer syntax than traditional AWS cloudformation scripts, and I particularly like the ability todry r...

Using prerender.io with haproxy

One of the main downsides of developing single page applications using frameworks like angularjs is that crawlers can’t read content that is rendered by javascript. This can seriously impact SEO, i...

NodeSchool Oxford

On 21st June 2014 I hosted a NodeSchool at the Jam Factory in Oxford as part of JSOxford’s Summer of Hacks. NodeSchool is a community driven, open source educational project that teaches JavaScript...

Zombies At My Conference

So I’m a fan of zombie things. Actually I’m a really big fan of zombie things. I’ve read all the Walking Dead comics and everything.James is also a really big zombie fan. He’s read all the Walking ...

Using AngularJS and Node

I’ve been using angularjs the “Superheroic JavaScript MVW Framework” on a couple of myprojects and I’ve become quite a fan. It really helps structure all the spidery browser side javascript that in...

Adventures in 3D, Episode 1

After deciding with Bruce to start experimenting with makerscanner, and with my trusty laptop tucked under my arm, we headed to Bruce’s batcave on a cold snowy evening.We have no wifi in the batcav...

Adventures in 3D, The Beginning

It all started in the pub. It almost always starts in the pub.Bruce and I got talking about 3D printing. Nothing special I guess, everyone’s getting excited about 3D printing, even Obama.Well, I’ve...

Publishing for Little Printer using Node.js and Heroku

“Little Printer lives in your home, bringing you news, puzzles and gossip from friends. Use your smartphone to set up subscriptionsand Little Printer will gather them together to create a timely, b...

Github and Pair Programming

At B2M we do a lot of pair programming. A lot of the time I am paired with James and between us we have developed several open source repositories.Now don’t get me wrong, I love using github. It’s ...

Offline Android Store and Forward

Last week I was working on an android client that can send MI data over a rest api. We were particulary interested in knowing when the device has limited or no connectivity. This presented an inter...

NHS Hackday 2012

It all started for me on 17 November 2011 in the upstairs bar of the Jericho Tavern in Oxford.Oxford Geek Night 24 was in full swing when Doctor Carl Reynolds took the stage. He was very engaging a...

The Pipeline Starts Before You Commit

So you’ve got a great continuous delivery pipeline runing on your build server, doing something like: Commit: unit tests, quality checks and coverage. Acceptance: longer running tests. Publish: ...

Atomic Operations on EC2

You have many EC2 instances on Amazon’s EC2.Each instance is stateless, identical and load balanced.You need to perform an ssh command across all instances, and if any fail you will need to make a ...