The power and peril of AWS: IAM edition
I was setting up some AWS IAM users in Terraform recently and ran smack into an issue that reminded me of the power and the peril of AWS. The issue at hand was ensuring that every user signed in with…
Author Archives: Culture Foundry
Rails Migrations, Done Manually
Rails has a great set of tools for managing database changes. These are called Active Record migrations and they were revolutionary when first implemented in the mid 2000s. I remember a friend saying that Rails had solved the "how do…
Standardizing your PRs with Github Pull Request Templates
We do all of our development using git, and most of our projects are hosting on Github. The pull request (PR) is a key part of our dev process, and writing excellent PR descriptions helps code reviewers and folks doing…
The Culture Foundry Development Process
This is an overview of the Culture Foundry development process. This process is continuously evolving (so this is a snapshot), but is aimed at creating quality websites and web applications while balancing the needs of our clients for speed. It's…
Remote Developers and Developer Club
At Culture Foundry we are 100% remote. We have core hours, but other than that, we don't care if you live in Kalamazoo or Timbuktu. As long as you have a fast internet connection. We use a variety of tools,…
Aspects of a great “State of [insert company name here]” presentation
Every six months or so, the Culture Foundry management shares a "State of the Culture Foundry". Much like a "State of the Union" speech, this presentation covers a wide range of topics and pulls from all areas of the company.…
Troubleshooting Caching
As they say, in computer science there are two hard problems: naming things, cache invalidation and off by one errors. Ba-dum-bum. At Culture Foundry we use caches extensively. Sometimes they are built into the application frameworks. Other times they are…
Serverless Scaling With S3
At Culture Foundry, we have some clients who see intense traffic spikes due to "real world" events. For this scenario, we've written a server-less solution that scales well at a reasonable cost (both in terms of dollars and developer time).…
Configuring MODX Revolution To Scale Horizontally
MODX Revolution is a PHP CMS with tons of functionality out of the box. It also has a lot of flexibility. Like most PHP CMSes, it uses a relational database to store data and puts file uploads on the filesystem.…
Meeting-Free Wednesdays
The maker and manager schedules are often at odds. In an agency like Culture Foundry, we keep Wednesday free of meetings. This allows everyone to be heads down and doing deep work for at least one day a week. I…
