It was never about the code.

• The o16g Manifesto

This site is alive but I've been busy with life and writing casual browser games as opposed to casual essays recently. Here's a selection of what's available at the moment. These also appear at Web Applications - there have been several recently.

"You can't rely on AI to write 'proper' production code" - or can you? I recently had to write my first Java service for production use, with zero prior Java experience and a week's deadline. In the event, I delivered it in a day using AI acceleration. Since I'm not sure that I can share details of that project, I'm showing how I did it by recreating the same approach with a React app - from zero experience to in-production code in a single day. The running implementation is here and the code is here

Here I designed and built out an architected API, able to support a (notional at this stage!) mobile application. I went from a toy-level application to a fully implemented serverless API with OpenAPI spec, encryption, authentication, testing, both free and premium tier features, and documentation. This article covers the journey at a high level, focussing on the lessons learned. I'm a big fan of incrementalism/iteration as a development approach. Not just in the sense of the Minimally Viable Product meme, but also as a method for decomposition- perhaps the most important skill for an architect or developer. I hope to show how that worked well here.

A short article but with a fun angle that you can share in 😄. Sometimes when I have time on my hands I try the coding kata approach- thinking of a challenge and coding that up. Here I came across a request on the PythonLearning subreddit by the user Mysterious_Lab5934 asking for a WordSearch generator in Python for print output. I decided to create one - code here. This took maybe an hour with LLM acceleration, most of that yak-shaving for an 'optimum' result.

Coming from a background of mostly Terraform, some CloudFormation/SAM, and a sample of CDK, I took a look at Pulumi (Python) - a comparable Infrastructure-as-code solution using general purpose programming languages rather than its own - by way of an example project. This article is about my experiences with it. Other people have already covered the general case of going from Terraform to Pulumi pretty well. Because of this I am only looking at the bits that stood out to me in this case. Short version - Pulumi is really nice, especially for intermediate features like programming logic and data manipulation.

How involved is it to break down a monolith into microservices? Is it worth it? Is serverless better than Kubernetes? Here's my example of breaking up my own Kubernetes 'mini monolith' into microservices and you can see both the before and after, together with my thoughts on it below. A deployed running example service is currently (August 2024) available here although I don't promise to keep it running there.

I recently transformed a command line desktop application into a web app and successfully deployed it to Kubernetes. You can find the code here and run it locally with Docker, or deploy it via Helm or ArgoCD to your Kubernetes cluster.

I recently had the opportunity to work on a project archiving data from a third-party service programmatically and making it available on a new platform. This was a change from the more platform-focussed work I've tended to focus on but I agreed to look into it and see what I could come up with. I was pleasantly surprised by the results, using the Serverless Application Model (SAM) and AWS Lambda. This article discusses that project and a (pocket sized) equivalent available on my GitHub, demonstrating a similar approach to a similar challenge- archiving health data with easy retrieval. It's one thing to talk about solutions; it's another to demonstrate them!

I recently completed some projects requiring use of CloudFormation in a real environment where I would typically use Terraform. I wanted to make the most of it and wrote up my experiences and conclusions across various projects using CloudFormation and its variations - SAM; CDK; CDKTF- compared to Terraform. Spoiler: CloudFormation has its niche(s), but it remains (IMO) a specialised tool.