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.

A cost-effective and aesthetic solution to the ugly holes and metal bolt ends left exposed if you assemble the Ikea 'Markus' chair without arms but don't have a 3-D Printer or are prepared to pay half the cost of the chair again for after market parts.

Recently I've seen a few people publishing Sankey diagrams (those coloured process diagrams) for their recent job searches. After finding it (initially) more of a faff to produce my own than I might have hoped I developed a tool to make this a bit easier. I thought that other people might also find this useful and so I am sharing it. Code is on my GitHub at Sankey-Pandas-Jobhunting-CSV-Processor. If you just want to use the utility then head over there- the following is the backstory.

For the majority of my career I have worked in AWS shops and (mainly) with Terraform. Neither of course is the only way and I would always argue against the 'golden hammer' mentality towards any tool or tooling. What are the pros and cons of CloudFormation with respect to Terraform? What experience have I had with CloudFormation? What is CloudFormation like today? Obvious(?) disclaimer: This article is written in the context of AWS services managed as code.

On the face of it this is a fairly pedestrian post subject. The devil, of course, is in the details. Here I wanted to deploy a new EKS cluster, with Prometheus and Grafana, cleanly and with good architectural domain boundaries. I am using the open source self-hosted stack, not the managed versions in this exercise. I also deployed using Open Tofu.

This evening one of the the big conversation pieces on Tech Twitter is Arc Search and their 'Act II of the internet' launch video:

"Our vision for Act II of Arc Internet pic.twitter.com/1RidKJVYUX" - Josh Miller February 1, 2024

Recently I attempted a Python challenge on HackerRank - 'The Minion Game'. My curiosity was piqued and I wanted to find out if the odds were as stacked as I initially thought. I was surprised that this wasn't already established publicly and so I worked it out 'myself'.

This is a follow-up article to one I published in June 2023 - 'Writing my own (Python) study course with ChatGPT - part 1'. This discusses a more structured and disciplined approach with reflective practice and constructive critique as part of learning and improvement.

Hashicorp recently made shock licensing changes to their stack to close their source code to 'competitors'. There has been much public comment and Open Terraform has already been announced in response. I see a strong future for OpenTF and a move towards Terraform itself being less used directly and more as an intermediate layer or stage for higher level tools as the gap that it occupies shrinks, as detailed below.