Most of the world runs on one CMS (content management system) platform, Wordpress. It is convenient for those of us who don't know how to build a site from scratch, but for those who want a small, lightweight and simple-to-use blog or static website, there are a few other options out there. Rather than using Hugo, Next.js or a pre-packaged option, it's very easy to build a Markdown-to-HTML generator in Python and get it ready to deploy to a static site server or even AWS S3.

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After using Terraform to build my AWS infrastructure almost since I first started, for the last year ot so I've been trying my hand with AWS CDK instead, a different approach that has some interesting advantages over the traditional Terraform state model, not least by missing out the TF AWS provider!

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Earlier this year, after spending quite a bit of time (and money!) getting the Discovery into a very usable and stable condition, there was an unfortunate incident that put the majority of that to waste. Here's a bit of a story about all the effort I put into the car since the first year, and where I ended up.

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While trying out a refactor for my Journal and a move towards more native AWS services with Lambda and DynamoDB, trying to fully test the application without using an AWS account itself started to become challenging. This article gives an overview of how you can use DynamoDB with Golang, and how to use TestContainers, something I've used extensively with Java, in place of a docker compose setup to wrap your Go tests.

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Almost a year ago, I started a new role as a Principal Software Engineer in Developer Experience, a role that while I'm passionate about, definitely started with some misconceptions. This is a short article about some of my initial experiences over the last year and the important takeaways I have, and how I'm going to use this to go forward in 2024.

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PKM (personal knowledge management) is something I started in my last position and have continued at my latest job. I use it to track everything I'm learning and doing, reviewing how my personal growth is being impacted on a frequent basis too so I can make changes that improve my performance day-to-day. It sounds extreme, but it doesn't take too much time.

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I host this website and my Jenkins setup on AWS, and have detailed in the past how I automate the setup of this. However, running an EC2 24/7 to handle occasional CI builds for personal projects didn't seem like the best idea, and I wanted to see if I could save money by thinking the process through a bit. This explains how I used AWS lambdas to automate the started of an EC2 through the AWS CLI, and how to set this up within GitHub and Jenkins to drop your single EC2 instance bill by around 90-95%.

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A few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to speak at the first DevHub North post-pandemic about the journey so far at Tesco Bank Technology, and how far we've come in a few years.

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Or the tale of two Land Rover Discoverys... The final part of my car history, including what I'm driving around in today (correct as of August 2022).

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Continuing the last post, part 2 details some newer cars when I was having a little more of a "sensible" period, but that didn't last long...

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