Tuesday, Mar 11, 2025
Quite excitingly, I have just about gotten around to tagging v6.0.0 of my docker-ansible project (Ansible (of all flavours 🍦) in Docker images (of all flavours 🍦). The latest change has made a massive uptick in amount of container images available as they are now all available on armv8 (for all the Graviton or Mac users).
Interestingly enough, I think that this might be the first major change that wasn’t actually made (and probably broken) by me, so a huge acknowledgement of my Epam colleague Pavel Pikta for assisting in the move from GitLab CI to GitHub Actions.
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Wednesday, Mar 5, 2025
Interesting perspective on Should Managers Still Code. I have moved less away from day-to-day coding (probably throughout my late 20s to early 30s), however, I always try to stay engaged. In fact, I probably have a greater breadth of coding experience now, despite the fact that I don’t write hundreds, or thousands of lines a month now.
I love the concept that you still understand how the code works and how it is being delivered, but for me it is as much about staying out of the way and not interrupting expert flow, whilst still being able to give guidance and assistance when needed.
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Tuesday, Feb 25, 2025
Enjoyed looking through this project this morning, mdq - Markdown Parser basically a parser for markdown to do fun things to select items like it is json from markdown (that is a terrible description). It is strange as internally, I mainly document things inside Markdown (shakes fist at Confluence) especially as it mean that I can more easily version control things.
To add to that its conceptual extension of jq which is not only a great tool for the least worst text based structured data but also been used for so many glue things that I forget.
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Thursday, May 9, 2024
There’s a quiet little ritual I find myself doing whenever I’m asked to enter a date of birth into an online form—especially when I don’t want to give away my real one. No, I don’t go for something obviously fake like “01/01/1900” or use my pet’s birthday. Instead, I go straight for January 1st, 1970. Not because it’s plausible. Not because it’s subtle. But because it’s the start of the Unix timestamp, and somewhere deep down, I hope it confuses their database just a little.
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Tuesday, Aug 8, 2023
I still can’t get over how people code with a white background. It’s one of those things that continues to baffle me, even after years of seeing it as the default in so many tools. Sure, for quick edits—like tweaking a file in GitHub or reviewing a merge request in GitLab—it’s fine. But when it comes to sitting down and actually writing or debugging code, a bright white editor just feels wrong. It’s harsh on the eyes, especially during long sessions or in low-light environments, and it often leads to more strain and fatigue than necessary.
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Tuesday, Jun 27, 2023
Personally and the industry as a wider community have all been working, assessing and reviewing architectures and tools to adopt LLM capabilities. From a personal side, I’ve been looking at running chain-of-thought prompts through LangChain and have run LLM models on my local machine (albeit they are much slower to respond).
Emerging Architectures for LLM Applications
I also really like the review of “What about agents?” at the end, I’ve tried with some successes and failures of using autonomous agents, but really feel that it gives great potential for the future. Anyway, have a browse.
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Tuesday, Jun 20, 2023
Interesting post about using S3 storage classes and how it saved Canva a whole bunch of money, but my favourite bit was “There’s very little to write about regarding the migration effort, which was an engineer’s dream! We applied a lifecycle policy to each of the buckets, and quickly migrated nearly 80 billion objects in approximately two days.”
Great to see how understanding, analytics and optimising the cloud gave large returns for a small engineering undertaking.
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Monday, Jun 12, 2023
Here is my hot take that I forgot to write about from hashtag#AWSSummitLondon last week, in emoji, 🖥 🤖: 🛒🏗: 🤑💰: 👪 🤓.
Not only was it a lot busier than last year in terms of numbers, but with the growth of something that we probably didn’t expect from last year (effective AI) a lot of new content.
There was a lot more AI đź–Ą 🤖 content and it was generally well received, however, very few people (partners or customers) have full access to all of AWS new services for AI… yet. There is a split between product companies buying đź›’ or building 🏗 AI services, probably more towards buying at the moment. I wonder how that will pan out, as to whether it will mean they remain on the edge of capability, or whether it will tie them to older versions. More seem to be buying from specialist companies at the moment. 🤑💰 Cost management was, of course, a well-covered subject, and I expect this to continue to be big going forwards. A lot of the management of cost has now become a significant extra framework around AWS. A split in sessions between how to manage costs and companies that have done it. And finally, great events at the end. To fill a London event with around 25,000 people đź‘Ş 🤓 (that was the rumour) is good news for AWS and for the cloud in general.
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Wednesday, May 17, 2023
Gartner has published its latest insights on trends shaping the future of infrastructure and while the full piece dives deep into evolving tech and strategy, I’ve boiled it down to four key takeaways:
Trend 1: Optimisation and refactoring of existing infrastructure is becoming critical, especially as organisations face economic pressures and the need to modernise without fully ripping and replacing. Trend 2: Containerisation and cloud-native architectures continue to dominate, driving agility, scalability, and portability across environments. Trend 3: On-premises infrastructure is evolving into API-driven models, aiming to offer cloud-like experiences even within data centres. Trend 4: Upskilling is non-negotiable—teams will need continuous training to keep pace with all of the above shifts. While these are all valid observations, my own take is that Sustainability and Impact (aka Green IT) will soon take centre stage, perhaps even overtaking trends like on-prem API abstraction. With growing regulatory, environmental, and social pressure, businesses are being asked not just how they build infrastructure—but what impact it has. Whether it’s optimising compute to reduce carbon, making smarter hardware choices, or measuring energy usage more transparently, green tech is moving from side-note to strategy.
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Tuesday, May 16, 2023
How are you looking to augment Generative AI with inner-source and internal AI systems?
I’ve been spending a lot of time recently thinking about how we look to build internal AIs. Although ChatGPT (and similar) are all great tools for coding (code generation/completion and explanation) there is a massive amount of internal code within companies that are not part of the AI system. Aligned with that are the cultural aspects of what has been internally created, the inner source and property that companies create.
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