Blog posts

The Tour de France just had one of its great editions, and this was the summer it vanished behind a paywall in Britain. A sport can be in rude health at the top and quietly dying at the bottom at the same time, and I think we just watched it start to happen.

Updated July 28, 2026

FIFA's president answered a World Cup of controversy by telling his critics to meditate, pray, or watch a football match. I did watch it. All of it. That is exactly how I ended up not trusting the people running it.

Updated July 27, 2026

The 2026 World Cup was full of decisions I can't prove were wrong. That's exactly the problem. When you no longer trust the people running the game, a bad call and a fixed one start to feel the same, and the sport quietly stops being worth arguing about.

Updated July 20, 2026

For a same-engine MySQL move, native binlog replication beats AWS DMS on the two things that matter: data fidelity and operational simplicity. Here is the reasoning, and the war stories.

Updated July 20, 2026

Move a large MySQL database to AWS RDS with near-zero data loss and a short cutover, using nothing but native MySQL tooling. The mechanics are simple; the sharp edges are all in the RDS control plane.

Updated July 20, 2026

AWS DataSync silently wrote every file as 0 bytes migrating GCS to S3, because it could not reconcile GCS's CRC32c checksums. The fix was to shard the job and match each shard to a tool that could handle it.

Updated July 20, 2026

A fully customised CrewAI project to generate a README file from a local folder

Updated May 29, 2024

What my personal Static Site Generator looks like, the mistakes I made and the lessons I learned.

Updated July 09, 2026

Some examples of practically useful unit tests to check that your code is producing the expected output.

Updated April 29, 2024

A full setup for a Vagrant Ubuntu 22.04 Dev environment, including a script to install software and configure the machine for an ssh user

Updated April 16, 2024

When you create a new AWS account, you need to prepare it for use. The first thing you should do is run AWS Nuke

Updated October 08, 2025

The best YouTube channels to subscribe to if you're interested in AI

Updated April 29, 2024

Save some money by scheduling your EC2 instances to stop and start with AWS EventBridge and Terraform

Updated July 08, 2026

Make custom GPTs your own, the more specific the better

Updated April 29, 2024

A wrap-up of our series: An Introduction to Advanced Terraform. Bringing all the concepts together in a fully dynamic example

Updated July 08, 2026

Using Terraform Cloud and remote state to manage infrastructure

Updated April 29, 2024

A deep-dive on manipulating data in Terraform, to prepare it for use in resource blocks

Updated April 29, 2024

Making it easy for other people to use your Terraform code

Updated April 29, 2024

Using Terraform workspaces and environments to manage infrastructure

Updated April 29, 2024

A quick look at the different data structures in Terraform, with some examples of how to use them

Updated April 29, 2024

Setting up Terraform providers and profiles for multi-region deployments

Updated April 29, 2024

This is the first article in a series that will introduce some fairly advanced terraform concepts quite quickly

Updated July 08, 2026

Working with multiple GitHub accounts on a single Linux machine

Updated April 08, 2024