The only good cloud is a google cloud
I’ve seen firsthand how AWS’s “good enough” attitude creates frustrating complexities and hidden costs, while GCP’s focus on sensible defaults and user-friendliness makes life so much easier. Seriously, AWS’s default zonal networking and their load balancer that didn’t even load balance across zones by default? Moronic! And don’t even get me started on their cluttered UI and opaque pricing. GCP, on the other hand, gets it right with global networking, intuitive interfaces, and transparent cost management. If you want a cloud platform that actually simplifies your life and lets you focus on building your product, GCP is the only game in town.
Enforcement can have the inverse effect
I live in a small city which is extraordinarily easy to cycle through.
Everything is a short distance, the cycle infrastructure is kept tidy and there is a distinct absence of anything that could even remotely be considered a hill.
That time my manager spent $1M on a backup server that I never used
The games industry is weird: It simultaneously lags behind the rest of the tech industry by half-a-decade in some areas and yet it can be years ahead in others.
What attracted me to the industry was not the glossy veneer working on entertainment products, or making products that I enjoyed using (I wouldn’t describe myself as a gamer): I love solving problems, especially problems that are not easily solved.
Microsoft Teams; using one monopoly to aid another
I’m increasingly frustrated with Microsoft’s relentless push for Teams, even in environments like ours where we prefer other tools. It feels like they’re abusing their market dominance and disregarding our choices. Teams being automatically installed and integrated with Office products, makes it already a struggle to opt out. They even force it on Windows 11 machines! I don’t like being told what to do, especially when it comes to software choices. So, I’ve decided to take matters into my own hands and find a way to sabotage the Teams installation process for all machines at Sharkmob.
DevOps; a decade of confusion and frustration
In this article I talk about the confusion surrounding the term “DevOps”. I discuss what DevOps is and what it isn’t. I argue that DevOps is not a cohesive movement or methodology. DevOps is often misused as a job title. I also argue that both developers and operations staff should have some understanding of each other’s disciplines.
I don't trust Signal
I don’t trust Signal because it pretends to be things which it provably isn’t and forces use of their controlled the network. This means that if Signal wanted to, they could intercept messages. In this article I show receipts, that while each individual issue is not back-breaking: casts huge doubts to me on if i should really trust them
GPG::SSH; notes for current best practices
When I start at a new company, I always do a refresher on my key security.
One thing I always hate about SSH is that the encryption scheme is pretty basic actually, and once your ssh-agent is loaded- anything can just request a sign/authorize.
Cloudflare is turning off the internet for me
Ok, I’ll admit, I’m not the largest fan of centralisation, but rarely do I so swiftly and effectively feel the crushing weight of it.
I happen to use a very nice Chromium-based web-browser which, when it opens has javascript disabled. Often I find that nothing works so I re-enable javascript and continue about my day.
How to survive an open office.
I’ve been struggling for some time to find a decent enough guide to actually accomplish anything meaningful (other than ad-hoc break-fix work) in my office.
One of the things I know is that this problem seems to affect me more than others, so for many people this advice (or lamentation) might seem like it comes from a weird place.
On the importance of self-hosted backups.
A long time ago I built a pretty big storage computer (16TB) which I built because SSDs at the time were pretty small and most laptops came with only a single possible SATA drive bay for storage.