Devops

I wrote recently about the difference between easy and simple.1 That post was philosophical. This one is not. This is what it looks like in practice. I have been building an AWS operations toolkit using Swamp. The toolkit investigates outages. It runs daily health checks. It composes nine separate extensions into two workflows that gather data from CloudWatch, X-Ray, EC2, Lambda, and load balancers, then produce an actionable report. This is the machine that builds the machine. Not the code. The system that produces the code and makes sense of the output. ...

We are living through a strange professional silence. Many of us use AI every day while feeling a quiet guilt about it. We worry that by offloading the labor of coding, we are offloading our value as engineers. We reach for the tool because it works. Then we wonder what it means that we needed it. The discomfort is not about the technology. It is the sense that we are moving faster than we can think. ...

There’s a thought provoking article by David Mitchell at The Guardian site right now. It’s relatively short and worth reading, and I say that even as someone who isn’t all that interested in the NHS project that frames the article’s opening paragraphs. Mitchell makes two points that I found myself both agreeing with as a developer and sysadmin, and leading me to further thought. First, from David Mitchell in I want to talk to you about the NHS… ...