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 🖥 🤖 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 🛒 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 👪 🤓 (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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Friday, May 12, 2023
A pretty exciting look into the future of CI job scaling at GitLab is taking shape and it’s clear they’re tackling some long-standing infrastructure pain points. Currently, GitLab uses Docker Machine to spin up ephemeral runners, which works… but comes with several limitations. Docker Machine is essentially in maintenance mode, and its abstraction layer can be clunky and inconsistent across different cloud providers. For large-scale CI/CD systems, that means reliability, speed, and fine-grained control are compromised, none of which are ideal in a fast-moving dev environment.
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Friday, Mar 31, 2023
What do you think about COMMIT_GUIDELINES being included in a project? Should you have a project (or central) standard for writing commits? What about [Conventional Commits])?
Pros:
Improves clarity across teams by making commit messages consistent and understandable. Helps with automation, like changelog generation and semantic versioning (especially with Conventional Commits). Makes code history easier to navigate and audit. Encourages thoughtful commits, which can improve code quality and documentation. Useful for onboarding new team members who can quickly understand the project’s development patterns. Cons:
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Friday, Mar 17, 2023
What would be your perfect base project on GitHub (or GitLab)? I would think it would include:
Documentation (readme, contributing, licence, changelog, security) PR/MR and Issue Templates CI/CD (Actions or GitLab CI - Superlinter? yamllint?) CODEOWNERS and options to include:
Pre-commits (?) Auto PR tools (Renovatebot?) .editorconfig or .vscode/ directory? Security (?)
Thursday, Mar 2, 2023
Just released (v4.3.2 of Docker Ansible)[https://github.com/willhallonline/docker-ansible/tree/v4.3.2] 😆 . A few changes (rolled from previous v4.3.* releases which then were fixed over the next 2). Bringing in RockyLinux 9, Alpine 3.17 as new base images 🆕 , dropping Alpine 3.12, Alpine 3.13 and Debian Stretch as EOL 🧟♂️ .
I still have longer-term ambitions to move this to being multi-stage builds (with multi-architecture at some point). Multi-arch is harder just due to the build times as using linux/amd64 for runners to build linux/arm64/v8 takes a long time. 😑
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Wednesday, Feb 1, 2023
With February rolling in, it finally feels like we’re turning a corner. The mornings are just a bit lighter, the evenings stretch a touch longer and suddenly, the days don’t feel quite so heavy. There’s something quietly powerful about not beginning and ending the workday in darkness. It opens up new pockets of possibility: a brisk walk before meetings, time in the garden after dinner, or a trip to the park with the kids before the sun slips away. Even the dog seems to notice the difference.
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