Hi, I'm Alex

Security Architect at Lendable

  • How to create a health check for an AWS user data script

    Introduction We use user data scripts when setting up servers. (I’m not sure why they’re called that, it’s actually just a script that runs when a new instance is created). We had some unexpected errors on production and found that...
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  • How we do remote pair programming

    We’ve recently moved to flexitime at UVD, so we’ve been waiting for a good time to try remote pair programming. We thought we’d share how we do it. We hosted a user story mapping workshop recently with seven attendees, as...
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  • Hiding the version number from NGINX headers

    So, what is “hardening” exactly? Hardening is the process of limiting the attack surface of your application and the supporting services. If you want to learn more about what an attack surface is, OWASP have some great resources. The vast...
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  • Setting up DNS for ELB Route 53 across multiple accounts

    Our testing environments are setup in the configuration “client-site.testing.our-company.com”, using AWS Route 53 to manage DNS records. This is hosted on our client’s AWS account, however our DNS is configured through Route 53 on our own account. Previously, we have...
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  • How to set up AWS Certificate Manager with NGINX

    How we chose AWS certificate manager I was recently tasked with getting an SSL certificate for uvd.co.uk (or TLS I should say). We’ve used them on a few websites before which has worked great in the production environment, but we’ve...
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