Triage, Diversity and Farewell

Over a month ago, my journey with gopuff came to an end. It took me longer than expected to process all the emotions and think about what to do next. I poured myself into building our industry-defining, vertically integrated, quick commerce business. The first few years were the most productive of my professional career, and I enjoyed every minute. I didn’t feel the need to write a farewell post. It was, however, an excellent set of lessons for my children....

September 8, 2022 · 3 min · Aaron Held

Azure Static Web Apps with Terraform

Devops is many different things to many different people, but nearly all practitioners agree that infrastructure as code is a critical part. So rather then use the Azure portal UI to create our desired resources we are going to script it in code. We will have confidence that we can create, destroy and eventually scale resources as needed. In this post we will create a Azure static using terraform, step by step....

August 27, 2021 · 7 min · Aaron Held

Les Held on the Today Show

My father was featured on Hoda’s Bucket list segment on the Today show. My dad never really wanted to talk about his past in public, but recently he met one of the soldiers from the US 30th Infantry who rescued him. With the passing of the last of the group who rescued him, he know wants to ensure his story is told. The today show segment didn’t go into detail of his rescue, but men like Matthew Rozell and Frank Towers have documented it on Teaching History Matters...

September 9, 2017 · 1 min · Aaron Held

Answers Chat bot for your WordPress blog

Introduction Chat based interfaces, backed by powerful AI (Artificial Intelligence), are effective ways to connect with your customers. For decades thousands of brilliant and dedicated scientists have collaborated to create AI and Language Processing to construct automated systems for the betterment of humanity. More recently Microsoft wrapped this magic in tooling that makes it accessible to the less sophisticated masses (and .net developers) When blogging became popular a number of companies sought to ‘commoditize’ the complexity of setting up a server and running custom website software....

April 15, 2017 · 3 min · Aaron Held

Reading Exchange Mail with Java

Many times I’ve had to sweep an inbox and do something with the email. Typically the easiest way is to use IMAP, but our corporate email server has IMAP disabled. Fortunately 2007 Microsoft Exchange has had a rich web service interface so I wanted to give that a try. One of the main patterns used is to read an email and then move it to something like an ‘archive’ or ‘error’ directory....

July 14, 2013 · 2 min · Aaron Held