It was difficult to implement Clean Architecture for the first time, and to do so while converting an existing project to it!

In the end, I was successful, and I was extremely happy I did the conversion on that project. It;s the right size of project, and it was a good time to conver it, since I only had a lot of code written (but not a ton!) and the project was not in production yet.

I can confirm that project will have a lot less of a hard time when I make changes to it.

To prevent future pain, I also wrote a boilerplate C# Clean Architecture solution from scratch and put it up on a Github repo. Check it out at https://github.com/gmagana/clean-architecture-example-csharp .

I think the sample solution will be useful for a person new to Clean Architecture. I certainly wish I’d had that sample code at hand when learning about the architecture!

In the future, I’ll be using that sample solution to start new projects. Hopefully it will be useful to other folks as well!

Feeling overwhelmed sucks. You feel bombarded from every direction, and all you want to do is run away from it all. We’ve all been there.

Tim Ferris suggests asking yourself these two questions when you’re overwhelmed:

1. In the midst of overwhelm, is life not showing you exactly what you should subtract?
2. Are you having a breakdown or a breakthrough?

As Marcus Aurelius and Ryan Holiday would say: “The obstacle is the way”, in other words, the obstacle itself gives you an insight to the solution. You just have to look.

Thank you Tim, for giving me the answer :-).

I highly recommend you read this book. The excerpt above is from the chapter titled: How to Say “No” When it Matters Most.

Front:

Back:

When I tried to do this seemingly simple task, I could not find any one guide on the web which told me everything I needed to do, so I write it myself I also ran into a bug in Ubuntu that at least shows up on Amazon: Authentication fails every time even though you are 100% sure you have the right credentials. This is tested on Ubuntu 14.04 on an Amazon EC2 instance, but it will probably work on other versions as well.

So here is what you need to do:

Step 1: Install vsFTPd

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install vsftpd

Step 2: Configure vsFTPd

sudo vi /etc/vsftpd.conf

Uncomment the following lines:

write_enable=YES
local_umask=022

Step 3: Configure chroot

Enabling chroot keeps FTP users confined to their hone directory tree. This usually a recommended security practice. To do this, edit the vsftd config file again:

sudo vi /etc/vsftpd.conf

Uncomment the following line:

chroot_local_user=YES

and add this line at the end of the file:

allow_writeable_chroot=YES

Step 4: Enable Passive Mode

Usually you want to enable passive mode on an FTP server. You set aside a range of ports to use for passive FTP connections. In the example below, I use port 40000 to 40100. To enabl;e passive mode, edit the vsftpd.conf config file again:

sudo vi /etc/vsftpd.conf

Append the following lines:

pasv_enable=YES
pasv_min_port=40000
pasv_max_port=40100
port_enable=YES

Passive address resolve

Passive connections require using a routable IP address from the remote host.

Do you have a fixed IP address on your server?  If so configure by appending these lines:

pasv_addr_resolve=NO
pasv_address=<SERVER_IP_ADDRESS>

If you do not have a fixed IP address and would like to user a hostname instead, append these lines:

pasv_addr_resolve=YES
pasv_address=<SERVER_FQDN>

SERVER_FQDN is the fully qualified hostname of the server that remote clients can find, such as ftp.mydomain.com

Step 5: Ubuntu vsFTPd authentication bug workaround

I ran into a bug where I could not authenticate into FTP even though I was sure I was using the correct credentials. I do not know ifd this is a general bug in Ubuntu, or only affects Ubuntu on Amazon. This is how to fix the problem if you are affected as well:

sudo apt-get remove vsftpd
sudo rm /etc/pam.d/vsftpd
sudo apt-get install vsftpd

This fixed the problem for me, and it was not a problem to run these steps after configuring vsFTPd.

Step 6: Open ports in the AWS EC2 control panel

You need the following ports open in the AWS security group: TCP 20 to 21

If you configured passive mode, then you need to open up that range of ports as well, in the example above I used ports 40000 to 40100

Step 7: Restart the vsFTPd service

Finally, you should have everything you need in order to connect via FTP to your server:

sudo service vsftpd restart

I went up to the roof to take a panorama picture of the view outside. I have spent many wonderful solitary moments in this rooftop just taking in the beauty of the city and thinking about the historical events that happened right here. Morelia played a very important part in the Mexican revolution: It witnessed the birth of the insurgency by the main characters in the revolution, as well as being the birthplace of revolutionary leader José Maria Morelos, hence the name change to “Morelia” in his honor.

Morelia, Mexico

Anyway, I was in the rooftop taking my pictures when I saw an old artifact just sitting in the rooftop leaning against a wall between an old bathtub and a rusted out dustpan: It was a tarnished “Best in Show” award plate made out of copper that one of our dogs had won on what feels like a lifetime ago.

Best in Show

To appreciate the significance of this award one must know something about our family: We were, for a couple decades or so, absolutely dog -crazy. There are pet owners, pet rescuers, and dog fans in this world, but we were absolutely dog-crazy. We would travel to the USA to purchase dogs we had scoped out and reserved months before they were born. We actually have framed pictures of dogs throughout the house interspersed with pictures of people.

We remember dogs as fondly as we remember close family members. You might hear a conversation around the house about our beloved old maid aunt Carlotta, who is rumored to have really still been a virgin when she died a couple years ago at age 95. You might also hear the same stories about dogs, such as Tiny’s (a Collie) extreme disdain of people wearing sandals. He would lunge at and bite without warning at anyone wearing sandals for some unknown reason. The psychological underpinnings of such sandal-hating tendencies have been the subject of much discussion in our family through the decades, and will certainly never be resolved. There are also stories about how Arthur, a huge Great Dane my uncle Jorge had. Which pure blood Great Dane is not huge? Anyway, Arthur was very playful, too much for his size. There was no leash to be purchased on either side of the border that could withstand Arthur’s lunge. There was no TV cable that could stand the excited swag of his tail either. If the TV signal was suddenly lost, Arthur’s tail was the prime suspect. We would go up on the roof and devise yet another way to keep the TV cable out of the deadly whip’s way.

Tiny, the sandal-hating Collie

There are also stories about another of Uncle Jorge’s dogs: Sam, a Siberian Husky. Sam was just crazy and over eager. Once he jumped to a neighbor’s property and killed all his chickens. We’re talking a lot of chickens. There is also the time he fell from the roof on top of a drunken guy walking by.

Also my beloved late uncle Alberto is fondly remembered in the family as were his most notable dogs: A pair of beautiful Afghan Hounds who required daily hair maintenance. We have a framed picture of those dogs too.

As for my mother and I, our most winning dogs were a pair of Kerry Blue Terriers, although we had several other breeds through the years as well. Yes, we have several framed pictures of those dogs as well.

And so on. One could make a list of my aunts and uncles and come up with several dogs each owned and describe the salient aspects of each (each human and each dog, that is!), and tell a bunch of stories about them all.

For a family with so many pure-breed dogs, dogs and dog shows were a way of life. Breed Standards were required reading done as the next purchase was planned and in preparation for dog shows. Maybe every other weekend on average we went to a dog show, no matter if attendance required eight or ten hours of driving each way. Nearly every time we came back with an award of some sort. In my mother’s house I even had my own display of ribbons and prizes won for handling show dogs as a child. If we had not moved to the USA thirty or so years ago, I would have most certainly maintained the family hobby. A great many things changed when we immigrated to the United States…
So back to the Best in Show award plate on the roof. By now it goes without saying that finding this maximum accolade of dog ownership abandoned on the roof was surprising. For all our dog show madness, I believe this was the only time we won a Best in Show. I believe it was won by Jack, our Kerry Blue Terrier.

The plate itself is deservedly large. It is a custom hand-hammered copper plate engraved with the heads of three dogs in the center, and the inscription of the event on the outside circular area. The fact that it’s made out of copper is of significance because it’s a natural resource found near here. The plate is very tarnished, though. It has obviously sat there forgotten for a long time. I am not sure why it’s not hanging in a prominent place inside the house.

I debated for some time whether or not to bring it in and clean it up. With the right liquids and an hour’s of scrubbing I know I can make the plate go back to its shining glory, making it new again, shimmering with pride as it is – after all – a Best in Show award won by a very dog-devoted family.

But the plate is also the past. The long-gone past. The only dog enthusiast in the family now is my cousin Omar but he breeds dogs and does not really show them.

The real choice to me was whether or not to try to make the past alive again by polishing the plate and giving it a more dignified location. But that past is dead, no matter how awesome it was. This house has enough memories of the past as it is. As I sit in the formal dining room in the pre-dawn hours writing this, I can hear the many sounds of the past, when this house was full of children running around, my aunts and uncles planning the next night out, my grandparents laughing and joking and having a drink with one of the ever-present visitors. The inside of this old proud house is filled with pictures. Those pictures are, in a way, attempts to cling to the past. So is this Best in Show award.

I decided to leave the plate where it was on the roof. I decided to say goodbye to the past, beautiful as it was, as if it were an old friend.

I know I will be back sometime in the future. I will go on the roof top again, and if I see that old award there, I just might sit next to it with a bottle of Tequila, just two old friends remembering a past that both love immensely, knowing that the past must be allowed to remain in the past.