
21 Dec 2018 TEL Newsletter – December 2018
Shine’s TEL group was established in 2011, like the date is important. We publicise the great technical work that Shine does, and raise the company’s profile as a technical thought-leader in the community through blogs, local meetup talks, conference presentations, and tattooing our logo on drunk developers. We curate all the noteworthy things that Shiners have been doing and publish a newsletter that nobody reads. Join us for a slightly festive edition. After all, nobody does Christmas better than corporate blogs.
On Santa’s Good List:
- Shahin Namin, an actual wizard (just ask to see his wand), showed off his augury skills by predicting the weather using ML. He then went on to read the entrails of a freshly slaughtered yak, giving each employee of Shine an individual, personalised forecast of the time and manner of their violent (and often embarrassing) deaths. So thoughtful of him. He will be Guest of Honour at Shine’s upcoming Summer Barbecue And Witch-Burning, so look out for that. Bring marshmallows to toast.
Last year’s Witch-Burning, a joyous occasion which everyone enjoyed. Everyone except the witch, obviously. Photo by Jass Sama on Pexels.com
- Kim Bratzel enthralled us with Getting Started with Azure Kubernetes Service, which I’m struggling to write anything funny about. Or festive. F*ck it, here’s a picture of a reindeer.
Kubernetes. Photo by Annika Thierfeld on Pexels.com
- Carrying on with the comedy-destroying kubernetes theme, Ryan Siebert wrote about Deploying a full stack application to Google Kubernetes Engine. Merry Christmas.
Kubernetes. Photo by rawpixel.com on Pexels.com
- David “Certifications” Ensikat, went to OWASP AppSec Day 2018 – Melbourne, which is just a collection of letters jumbled up that make no sense. OWASP AppSec. AMFART OppShop. ABFAB UmpSlap. DIMKNOB BotNot.
- Michael Bloch gave us his beautiful poem on Road to InSpec(t) AEM (OpenCloud). Quite moving, and so deep. A lot to think about there. Look out for his forthcoming book: “Meditations on Mortality (AEM OpenCloud)”.
Photo by Suzy Hazelwood on Pexels.com
- Archit Kejariwal went to DDD Melbourne Conference 2018, the annual Dodgeball meetup. We all remember the five Ds of Dodgeball of course: dodge, duck, dip, dive, and dodge.
- Eric Chen wrote Using Webpack to Unleash Your Drupal 8 Project with Modern JavaScript, which all sounds very exciting. Who doesn’t want to unleash their projects? Cry “Havoc”, and unleash
the dogs of waryour internal corporate intranet site! - Kai Xia gave us Drift detection in Cloudformation: A first look, which was the discarded title for the movie which eventually became Tokyo Drift.
Look at that: clouds of smoke, and a drifting car. That might be the only relevant picture in this whole article. Photo by chris howard on Pexels.com
- Alan Young infiltrated the Shearwater Capture The Flag 2018 competition with his crack team of people who totally knew what they were doing.
You know the TV show “Mr. Robot”, well the thing they did was just like that show. Full of drugs, mental illness and anarchy. Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com
- Erin Zimmer demystified This (and why it’s so weird in JavaScript). Now we just have to get her to explain what a “monad” is and computer science will be sorted.
A monad is a monoid in the category of functors, you say. Good job I wore my fluffiest suit jacket for this, I’m going to need to hug myself. Photo by bruce mars on Pexels.com
- Priya CR gave us SSO with SAML Authentication Using Shibboleth IDP. In the Bible, the pronunciation of the word “shibboleth” incorrectly resulted in forty-two thousand Ephraimites being slaughtered (this is not a joke, by the way, look it up). Nowadays we are much more tolerant, except in the case of people who say “scone” wrong.
Holy crap, Karen, he’s right: “Thou must not allow to live he who sayeth ‘scone’ such that it rhymeth with ‘bone'”, book of Pedants Ch.12 Vs.35 Photo by nappy on Pexels.com
- Noted certification collector, David Ensikat, went to AWS re:Invent 2018 – Event Wrap and gave us his thoughts. You too could attend this event, you just need to have passed a minimum of 38 AWS certification exams.
- Elder God Ben Teese, bless his tentacles, temporarily roused from his slumber deep beneath the oceans to give us his wisdom. Doing The Simplest Thing That Can Possibly Work (If You’re Not Sure What To Do Next) Heed his warnings, or death will surely follow.
Photo by Suzy Hazelwood on Pexels.com
Presentations & meetups:
- Erin Zimmer, famous explainer of Javascript, gave a presentation at the Google Devfest in October, all about web components.
- Gareth Jones, famous confuser of cats, gave his sentiment analysis presentation at a different Google Devfest in November. This was totally a different presentation to the one he gave at YOW! Data earlier in the year, and not recycled at all.
- Erin Zimmer, thrice-mentioned-in-this-article, gave a presentation at MelbJS about… *checks notes*… web components.
Upcoming things & other random news:
- If you’re in London in May, you can see Erin “Web Components” Zimmer talk about Web Components at the International Javascript Conference. Web Components.
- Web Components.
- Web Components.
Happy Kubernetes To One And All

Ah, Kubernetes. The most magical time of year. Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com
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