The Archive.

So, I’m a sucker for wordplay and puns. Anyway… There’s a line in my shell history that goes back to 2022: go get github.com/wilhelm-murdoch/go-collection. For years it was the first dependency into …

I knew the moment I thought about potentially adding variable definition blocks as a first-class feature Glazier it was going to bother me until I went about implementing it. So, as expected, a week later, here we are. I …

I live in tmux. I typically have an editor here, a dev server there, logs tailing in the corner or a spare pane for poking at things. The trouble is that this little world is frustratingly ephemeral. Rebooting my machine …

A while back, in Reading Between the Posts, I wired up the home page so the quiet gaps between articles would narrate themselves - “1 bit and 41 changelog events in between”. There was just one tiny problem …

The front page of this site has always been a plain list of articles. Which would be fine if I wrote longer-form articles a bit more often. I do, however, make code commits to this site far more frequently. I’m …

If you scroll up to the top of the home page, you’ll find a pair of little rows of green squircles. It’s my own dumbed-down take on GitHub’s contribution graph. Effectively, it’s the same idea, …

This blog has been quietly chugging along for a while now without me paying it much attention. Which is, I suppose, the whole point of a set-and-forget setup. But “set-and-forget” has a sneaky way of becoming …

This site has a changelog page. It’s not one I write by hand as it builds itself from my activity on GitHub every time the site deploys. I think it’s a neat little trick. It also spent a solid afternoon …

I’ve been having such a good time building up this website and Hugo has been incredibly fun – and relatively simple – to work with. Though, from time to time, I find myself scratching my head at the absence of a …

Late last year I parted ways with Hashnode as the platform of choice for my blog. They pivoted a bit too far into the generative AI space which — to me for a blogging platform — made little to no sense. What? You write …

I tend to look at a lot of log output throughout the day as part of my role as platform engineer. This obviously extends to any backend, or ops-related, role. One little niggle that always gets to me is tailing output …

I’m not super-active on Instagram these days and Threads was a real let down. I have a dormant Mastodon account, but find myself being quite happy on Bluesky at the moment. Who knows how long that will last. Having …

This is often referred to as the “Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF)” in the context of Site Reliability Engineering. It’s a somewhat counterintuitive concept that highlights the fact that failures or …

Simply put, I love plants and I love animals. I can’t count how many times I’ve been to a plant nursery and had to stop and do a Google search to see if something was safe enough to bring home and keep around …

Responding to company chat messages in a mocking and sarcastic tone is one of my favourite past times. Classic engineer snark as it were. We’re all in on the joke. However, the artful nuances of snark via online chat …

As is the case with any seasoned DevOps engineer, I have a set of tools in my kit that I simply cannot live without. If I had to distill them into a top-5 list it would be the following.

Previously, last blog post I wrote covered how to make a quick escape with your precious hoard of custom Slack emojis. It was fairly well-received, but didn’t quite cover the next step in the migration process; how do …

As is stupid tradition, whenever I start at a new company, one of the first things I like to do while getting settled in is upload my favourite emojis to whatever real-time messaging platform is in use. I know it’s …

At a prior role, I managed just under 20 AWS accounts. Their uses varied from production workloads, to dedicated CI/CD environments, sandboxed areas for our engineers to experiment in, log aggregation, the list goes on.

I’m in the middle of decommissioning a service at the moment and I have to do the typical process of performing final snapshots and cleaning up extant resources. It’s incredibly tedious, so let’s walk …

If you’ve spent any time in an ops-related position, you’ve had to add these records when using custom domain names while integrating with some 3rd-party service. Especially, if you’ve ever wanted to …

If you’ve spent any time job hunting in the tech industry, you’ve had to deal with recruiters. I like to joke around with my peers about how they’re a necessary evil, but in all seriousness, great …