I’ve been taking a break from gainful employment, and filling the craving for tasks by doing Boot.dev courses. My bio on the site currently reads: Rusty CS masters grad from Canada, minor in psych to help understand HCI. Taking boot camp to cure 5 years confinement to OPS, and prolonged exposure to business 4GL and wishful approaches to AI. I’ll unpack the snark in other posts. Today I thought I’d say a quick thanks to Boot....

(From my hand-written notes.) Do I choose to use AI today? Efficiency for me but not for thee or society – Unknown Broligarch I find this decision to be more urgent and more difficult every day. On the one hand, not choosing to employ AI in solving a particular problem decreases the range of candidate solutions I can practically explore as a solo programmer. On the other hand, the opportunity to effortfully stretch my own organic neural net and thereby expand its future utility should not be squandered....

While reading Hugh Howey’s Shift I was jolted out of the novel by three thoughts in quick succession. The first was an awareness of mild discomfort in my eyes, typical in this ragweed season. The second was a rush of fear of imminent loss – will this crispness fade again? And the third was a response – no, these are my eyes now. This week I had my first cataract surgery; the next is early in September....

TL;WR If you’re moving your software development practices to Kubernetes, please don’t rush the packaging work (i.e. the charts, operators, and pipelines). It might seem that spending time here is a waste of effort, but rushing this part — or worse, working backwards from manually deployed customer environments — will cause expensive delays when you can least afford it. A Dubious Analogy In just about every business, the pressure to deliver can be immense....

Today I learned that LocalStack 🔗 was a thing. If you need to learn the AWS API on a budget, or if you have AWS in your CI/CD pipeline and you want to test your deployment code, this looks like an amazing resource. Note to self: this is the first “TIL” post, but I really should be making a habit of it. I come across amazing stuff several times a week....