Wednesday, Dec 7, 2022
After quite a long time of languishing, I have decided to let MOTNearMe.co.uk go. I have run it since 2013 and had millions of views over that time, working with some (at the time) interesting tech around geo-location, faceted search and social media automation.
I still remember having some chats with people about what we could do with it (could we pre-book MOT Tests for people in advance and just email them to let them know it was all sorted; could we find MOT tests for people locally). For now, you can probably just Google it, or use other services, but at the time (in 2013) there were very limited options. All interesting and a bit of the past let go.
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Tuesday, Nov 15, 2022
Do you know the concept of “code smell”? It was invented in the late 1990s (before I worked in IT, when I was just a boy, breaking computers at home) to represent “any characteristic in the source code of a program that possibly indicates a deeper problem”. What is and is not a code smell is subjective, and varies by language, developer, and development methodology. However, I often feel that there are some consistent ways to be able to review projects to understand the “smell” of them:
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Thursday, Nov 10, 2022
I was thinking of a thought experiment today regarding Cloud Native, or the concept of Cloud Native in comparison to Cloud Traditional (not sure that Cloud Traditional is a term).
When we imagine Cloud Native, we are looking at containerisation (containers) and orchestration (K8S). Whilst there are other options, these represent what I think to be the core of Cloud Native. When I think of Cloud Traditional, we are thinking VMs and infra provisioning (I’m going to imagine using EC2/AWS).
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Wednesday, Nov 2, 2022
An interesting view into how Slack use Terraform, touching on how it manages state files (teams controlling their own state), Terraform versions, managing providers and modules. The most controversial point from my opinion is using Jenkins? But I guess we all have our own legacies to deal with.
Slack’s Terraform approach is a great peek behind the curtain of how a fast-moving company scales infrastructure-as-code—but it’s not all magic. They started out with a fairly standard setup (global state + one per AWS region), but as their cloud footprint grew, so did the complexity—eventually ballooning into over 1,400 state files. That’s impressive, but also raises some eyebrows: managing that many states can easily veer into “too much of a good thing” territory. Their tooling choices—like S3 for backend storage and DynamoDB for locking—are solid and well-proven, but not groundbreaking. It’s more evolutionary than revolutionary, which isn’t a bad thing, but might not excite smaller teams looking for bold ideas.
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Thursday, Sep 22, 2022
For anyone who has worked with me, they know I love a changelog and versioning. Whether it is because I sometime forget what I did a year ago, with different projects, technologies and methodologies all competing for brain space, or whether it is just so you can track what you released when, I find them an integral part of all software engineering… I’d love to see what others think I should add.
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Thursday, Sep 8, 2022
I often hear from some people that there are so many companies that have completed and mature in their Cloud Native architecture, DevOps and Cyber Security, however, we are probably still in the foothills.
The tech winners and losers of the pandemic.
What we still see is a signification growth of the major hyperscalers, with others trying to complete on location rather than size. Whilst we will probably see this for a while, especially with a number of companies still requiring on-premise datacenters, it seems hard to imagine how others would compete, or manage to outspend/grow the major hyperscalers.
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Thursday, Jan 13, 2022
Had a good moment yesterday. I spent 2 hours “troubleshooting” a problem where I had terminated 2 ends of armoured ethernet in my house… Turns out that I had wired them upside down. Reminded me of years ago getting dusty cabling up buildings in the middle of the night.
Actually, I’m pretty glad that I don’t have to do that anymore.
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Monday, Jun 28, 2021
There is so much great documentation within the AWS docs, sometimes it is as much about finding the right article to lead the way. I just stumbled on [AWS’s Security Reference Architecture guide(https://docs.aws.amazon.com/prescriptive-guidance/latest/security-reference-architecture/architecture.html)], this is like a treasure map for cloud security fanatics! It’s built around a simple three‑tier web app (web, app, data), but the twist is that every layer is build with security in mind: IAM, logging, network defenses, encryption—you name it, it’s diagrammed and explained. You get clear advice on account structure (Security, Infrastructure, Workloads OUs), where each AWS service fits, how they talk to each other, plus pointers to code templates in CloudFormation or Terraform.
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