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)[https://github.com/jqlang/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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Tuesday, Apr 9, 2024
It often seems like we’re caught in an endless cycle of redefining roles and disciplines within tech—DevOps, DevSecOps, Platform Engineering, Site Reliability Engineering, Cloud Engineering—each iteration arriving every two or three years to align with the latest trend, tool, or methodology. While these evolving titles and categories attempt to capture real changes in practice and tooling, they also tend to muddy the waters. At a certain point, you start to wonder: can’t we just call all of this Software Engineering and move on?
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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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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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Wednesday, Jan 11, 2023
I may not have the most advanced artistic skills, but there’s something truly special about the power of visual communication.
Whether it’s a pipeline, technical architecture, cloud model or even just an idea, the ability to convey and communicate a concept or approach, especially to make it more inclusive and reduce the technical barrier to understanding makes it such a great skill. Overall we can think of a few reasons why it is great:
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Thursday, Jan 5, 2023
As we start off this new year, it’s natural to think about making significant changes or setting big goals for ourselves. But for me, I’m finding that I’m feeling a little hesitant about making too many sweeping changes all at once.
In DevOps in general we think about iterating and cycling through small changes towards a larger sense of transformation. I think it’s important to remember that every day is a chance to make small changes, and that it’s okay to take things one step at a time. After all, it’s the little things that add up to make a big difference in the long run.
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Friday, Dec 9, 2022
I always love it when I get external validation for things that I “bang on about” inside work. This one is around the cost of waiting for builds. It is something that I have experienced myself in my open-source projects (hello, docker multi-arch builds).
(Experiment: The hidden costs of waiting on slow build times)[https://github.blog/engineering/experiment-the-hidden-costs-of-waiting-on-slow-build-times/].
It puts hard data behind what many of us intuitively know—build wait times have a very real impact on developer efficiency and satisfaction. The article highlights how even modest improvements in build speed can translate to big wins across engineering teams. It’s a great reminder that investing in faster pipelines isn’t just about shaving off minutes; it’s about respecting developers’ time and keeping teams in flow.
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Tuesday, Jun 15, 2021
New sidebar menu inside GitLab.com - I’ve shown the infrastructure parts with Terraform state. Exciting to see more options in there all the time.
What’s particularly exciting is how GitLab continues to expand what’s available in that sidebar. It’s not just about code anymore—more options for CI/CD, infrastructure, and even security are becoming increasingly prominent. It’s a nice reflection of how GitLab is growing into a truly comprehensive DevOps platform. I’m looking forward to seeing what else they sneak into that ever-evolving sidebar. Little upgrades like this show that the GitLab team is really paying attention to user workflows.
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