This post (Part I) walks you through a Git repo I put together to allow anyone to fine-tune a model to write emails in their own ‘voice’. I did this to use a small model that I could run at home to help me draft emails that didn’t suck. You don’t need a hefty GPU, … Read more
I’m excited to announce that I’m writing a new book for O’Reilly: Follow the Money: Understanding the Financial Architecture of Software. This is a project that’s been quietly brewing for several years. 👇 The book’s primary goal is to help those engineers and managers whose efforts to change their organisations with technology hit the buffers … Read more
This post is aimed at those interested in continuous compliance, an extension of cloud native principles to the area of software compliance, an under-developed field of software automation. My consultancy, Container Solutions is working on an open source project to help automate the management and reporting of controls, and this post arose from that work. OSCAL? OSCAL stands … Read more
What is Crossplane? If you don’t already know, Crossplane is billed as an: Open source, CNCF project built on the foundation of Kubernetes to orchestrate anything. Encapsulate policies, permissions, and other guardrails behind a custom API line to enable your customers to self-service without needing to become an infrastructure expert. Another way to view Crossplane is as … Read more
When I started my career as an engineer in the early noughties, I was very keen on developer experience (devex). So when I joined a company whose chosen language was TCL (no, really), I decided to ask the engineering mailing list what IDEs they used. Surely the senior engineers, with all their wisdom and experience, would tell … Read more
This post was originally triggered – and I choose that word carefully – by a recent experience on a cloud cost-optimisation project. These experiences prompted me to consider how things had changed since I started working in software. As part of the project that provoked me, I was researching the topic of cloud cost analysis … Read more
As someone who has worked in software since 2001, and in the Cloud Native (containerisation and Kubernetes) space since 2013, I’m getting old enough to have seen trends come and go a few times. VMs came (and stayed), continuous integration went from a fad talked about by gurus to the mainstream of software delivery, and … Read more
TL;DR I used private and public LLMs to answer an undergraduate essay question I spent a week working on nearly 30 years ago, in an effort to see how the experience would have changed in that time. There were two rules: The experience turned out to be radically different with AI assistance in some ways, … Read more
Other Posts Pipes The pipe is the next-most used feature of jq after filters. If you are already familiar with pipes in the shell, it’s a very similar concept. How Important is this Post? Pipes are fundamental to using jq, so this section is essential to understand. We will cover: Setup Create a folder to … Read more
Other Posts Simple Filters In this section we introduce the most-frequently used feature of jq: the filter. Filters allow you to reduce a given stream of JSON to another smaller, more refined stream of JSON that you can then do more filtering or processing on on if you want. How Important is this Post? Filters … Read more