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.

Background

I recently needed to replace my (home) office chair. The previous one was from a company whose name sounds like ‘Playfair’ and I didn’t want to buy from them again. The company was fine but the chair had failed after 10 months (gas piston), been replaced under warranty/goodwill but then one of the bolts had sheared after another 10 months and I’ve found from other purchases also that their stuff generally doesn’t last. I decided on the Ikea Markus chair as it has good reviews on the Interwebs, a ten year warranty, and isn’t ridiculously expensive. I did consider the more expensive JÄRVFJÄLLET but I didn’t think that any of the additional features would be useful/desirable for me, e.g. seat depth is adjustable but max was no greater than the Markus, and it didn’t seem like it could be assembled without the arms. I didn’t want arms because:

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.

Introduction

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.

The code and the short version is HERE. The following is the commentary.

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

Commenters are talking about what this means for Google and their ’ten blue links’ but I think there are some lessons from history that might be worth considering here and some examples that may give us an idea of what to expect next.

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’.

The Game

The initial task was to complete code to calculate Kevin and Stuart’s scores programmatically for this game (I believe this description is free to reproduce)- via ChatGPT:

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.

What changed?

I had been searching for, sometimes random, exercises. Whilst discussing the first article (above) during a job interview, an interviewer suggested that Code Golf might be a good alternative to the sometimes complex and advanced challenges given in ‘Advent of Code’. I would have to agree that many of the Code Golf challenges are a better fit for cultivating familiarity with decomposing problems, language syntax etc. They are certainly much more concise in what is required and generally quick enough to tackle in a relatively short time. The brevity is a key strength, because if it’s something that is going to take hours and hours then it will be something that is only tackled occasionally or rarely. With shorter exercises it is possible to tackle something most days. The other great thing wth Code Golf is that it validates solutions as either passing or not.

introduction

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.

What is impacted?

I am not a fan of repeating information that is publicly available so I don’t propose to rehash the public announcements or discussions. It isn’t just Terraform, or all of Terraform that is impacted however. Whilst I am sure all of the Hashicorp products have their adherents and some of them leverage each other, most of them have viable competition when working in a cloud environment.

I’ve written previously about using ChatGPT to provide Artificial Intelligence (‘AI’) support for coding and tutoring in unfamiliar areas. What about using it on home turf, i.e. in an area with which I am familiar- in this case a Terraform module for generic use?

(W)here’s the Code

It’s not necessary for following the below article but the code is published on GitHub and in the Community module registry

Background

Recently I was tasked, in a consultancy capacity, with providing a Terraform module for a (generic) AWS IAM Role for private/team use. It was up to me whether I wrote one from scratch or used public code. There are something like (approaching) 200 modules for this in the Hashicorp public community module registry so I reviewed some of the top candidates there. This is a requirement that has existed for a long time, where there have been various changes to recommended practice over time, new features introduced and some, whilst still supported, are deprecated. Notably it’s also a space where there aren’t necessarily clear boundaries to the problem and different publishers have provided solutions with different feature sets, e.g. some modules feature creating aws_iam_openid_connect_provider or aws_iam_instance_profile. In my view, whilst closely associated, these aren’t part of an IAM role. I didn’t have time to review every offering and so I created a new one for our team. Due to pressures of time and restrictions on tooling there were some corner features that I did not get to develop fully before we moved on, although they were not needed for the use case to that point.

Introduction

I’ve previously written about writing applications with ChatGPT. Now I am writing about using ChatGPT as a coding tutor.

Background

I have always struggled to find application software coding projects to improve with. I’ve not been driven primarily in that space, but as a result I have struggled to improve my coding chops. I do get to do some ‘proper coding’ in the day job but it is occasional and limited. Where I have tried to up my game with book and video courses I have found that the learning is never suitably paced. Typically it’s too slow at the beginning and then suddenly too fast - classic ‘How to draw an Owl’ Territory: