A new conversational Artificial Intelligence service - ChatGPT - has been making waves this week. I tried using it for a small coding project and was impressed. I think it has some profound implications for the software industry. (W) here’s the code # Of course it would be daft to not make the code discussed available so here it is with builds published for: darwin-amd64 darwin-arm64 linux-amd64 windows-amd64 Background # I’m a Platform Engineer.

Original context # I originally set up a portfolio website back in 2016. At the time I was still chasing for Linux Sysadmin and as part of my studies/preparation I had been setting up LAMP/LEMP stacks, on bare metal, in VM’s, even on AWS (probably with LightSail, I can’t remember). I had some familiarity with Wordpress as a result and didn’t really look beyond it for a website solution. I wanted my own domain (so I didn’t look at WordPress.

This Article is also published on Medium As I write this we are still in what I guess are the early stages of the Corona Virus /Covid-19 Pandemic. Whilst the situation is still rapidly changing, I am not alone in thinking that some of the social impact from this outbreak will be long-reaching. It’s mid-March and I am in the UK. Sports and social events are being cancelled left, right and centre as people are advised to stay home.

This post is also published on Medium It’s kind of a standing joke in the industry - do some cool thing with AWS to implement an infrastructure feature, and if it works well, Amazon will come along a few months later with some matching in-house feature. Sometimes that feature might be a relatively simple thing, maybe something that was obviously missing, sometimes you might have had a whole project that was essentially deprecated, and sometimes it’s a feature of a larger piece of work that means you have to adjust or re-evaluate your approach.

This article has also been published on Medium There has been much written about the right way to handle alarms and alerts for Sysadmins, Ops and Reliability Engineers. I take the approach that you can learn as much from looking at how not to do it. Here are some examples. I’m sure readers can think of many more. This is one small part of a big field and doesn’t begin to cover all the other areas that system monitoring and feedback etc.

Deploying ssh Bastion as a stateless service on AWS with Docker and Terraform # I also have a presentation and live demonstration on the below, so far given at DevSecOps - London Gathering June 13 2018. This article has also been published on Medium The mantras of software as a service, stateless, cattle vs. pets, etc, are often and loudly repeated, but in many environments you often don’t have to look too far before you find some big fat pet box sprawling somewhere.

**25 Minute reading time **(but article is composed of short, numbered sections!) 1 - why is this article different to every other blog post on the ELK stack? # There’s a lot of articles on ElasticStack/ELK components out there, I found a LOT that were extremely basic, essentially school project level reiterations of official elastic.co documentation and also a few that were very high level, essentially assuming that you already know everything and are wanting to ’talk shop’.

One of the big differences between being a good hobbyist with Linux and working commercially with it is dealing with proprietary software. You can use and configure all sorts of systems indefinitely on your own account and never come up against dealing with awkward proprietary software that is supposedly officially supported for your platform that you really need to make work. Recently I had this experience. Not only was I able to get it working but I was able to extend it beyond the manufacturer’s original provision to make it more user friendly and less work to administer.