Laurence A. Lee

What It Is # Saimin 2 is a browser-based recreation of Saimin Chat System — a real multi-user BBS that ran on an Apple II+ in Aiea, Hawaii in the 1980s and early 1990s. Five phone lines, 300 baud, a small community of regulars who dialed in to chat in real time.

What It Was # Migration Manager was an in-house client/server platform built at Hawaiian Airlines to migrate FluentBit log exporter configurations from a legacy log repository (ElasticSearch on AWS) to its replacement (AWS OpenSearch) — across a fleet of 100+ systems, without downtime.

What It Was # Boarding Pass was a hybrid ticketing system built for the Waikiki Trolley — Honolulu’s iconic open-air sightseeing service. The solution bridged a physical paper pass experience with digital validation, deliberately designed around the trolley’s customer base: predominantly elderly tourists who were technology-averse and expected a tangible ticket in hand.

What It Was # The WBIDA Mobile Concierge was an internal field operations application built for the Waikiki Business Improvement District Association — the organization responsible for managing and maintaining the Waikiki commercial district in Honolulu. The app was used by WBIDA’s Aloha Ambassadors, the district’s uniformed street-level field staff, as their primary tool for logging activity and reporting issues across the district.

I’ve been relaunching this site for about a decade now. If you dug into the Wayback Machine, you’d find the following progression: a WordPress blog, then “Lalee Consulting” on Camaleon CMS, then an Odoo installation that I absolutely should not have run as a public website, then a placeholder holding page that I kept updating the relaunch date on (“Relaunching July 2018. Probably.”), and eventually a nearly-empty Hugo site.

I earned four AWS certifications in a roughly 14-month sprint through 2020 and 2021: AWS Certified SysOps Administrator – Associate (Dec 2020) AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (Jan 2021) AWS Certified Developer – Associate (Jan 2021) AWS Certified Alexa Skill Builder – Specialty (Mar 2021) They all carried a three-year validity window. They’ve all expired.

I’ve set up the FluentBit → OpenSearch log pipeline a few times across different environments. Each time I hit the same set of underdocumented rough edges. This is the post I wish I’d found the first time.

What It Was # RPM Back-Port Publisher was an in-house pipeline built at Hawaiian Airlines to solve a specific, urgent problem: getting a patched version of Squid onto production RHEL 8 and 9 systems after Red Hat’s standard package update cycle couldn’t deliver one in a reasonable timeframe.

What It Is # Postman Prometheus is a fork of the original postman-prometheus tool, extended to support running multiple Postman collections continuously and exporting their combined results as Prometheus metrics.