I think almost any nerd remembers their first computer monitor. Mine was a tiny CRT one that could only display a few lines of amber text. It was hooked up to an Intel 8086 I think and even though it was very outdated at the time already, it was my very first personal computer. Fast forward to today, by now I've...

2024 has not been the best year for me and my family. My wife got diagnosed with a chronic illness called MS, which has turned our life upside down in a number of ways. Death has also been a big theme last year. I didn't think I'd already be dealing this much with it at 37, but here we are. It's been tough and that...

My gaming habits can be summed up in a single word: erratic. I have a Nintendo Switch and an Xbox Series X just sitting there, collecting dust most of the time. Turning on the tv, powering on the console, waiting for things to update and then finally playing a game just feels like a burden. Espescially the part...

Here's a fun new thing in the blogosphere: sharing your default apps. I saw a few people I follow do it and borrowed the format, as one does. A ton more pages like this to look at are catalogued by Robb Knight. I've always been a minimalist since having too much stuff doesn't fit in my brain. The same is true on my...

Some time ago I wrote about config-driven import which became available in Terraform 1.5. Import blocks are a way to import existing resources into the statefile, which is useful when you have a bunch of infrastructure that was created manually. Yesterday Terraform 1.7 was released that extends this functionality...

Anyone that knows me well can attest to me being a dreadful sports person in almost every category; except for one: running. I've been running for a very long time, I could at one point run a 5k in 20 minutes and a 10k in less than 50 minutes. I never really had a plan, I just go out for a run and don't think about...

The idea of a personal wiki has always appealed to me. I tried a few times to incorporate one into my "workflow" if I even have one. I tried all sorts of different tools but the latest one that's been keeping me occupied is Obsidian. I really want to like and use Obsidian, but I'm unable to. Let me explain. I've...

Anyone who uses Terraform must be familiar with the import command; it allows you to gather existing resources and put them into your statefile. This way, existing resources which were previously not created using Terraform are now under management of your infrastructure as code. You can import your resources in the...

In the realm of Amazon Web Services there's this thing called a Landing Zone, a set of infrastructure as code modules built to deploy new environments faster. You can build a Landing Zone using CloudFormation, CDK, Terraform, or any other tool you like. The point is that you have a starting point for as many...

For years and years I've been using Jekyll as my static site generator of choice, mostly because I like their templating engine and I'm a fan of Ruby as a programming language. I've been experimenting with Hugo as well, but it never really clicked for me. Well, until I found the perfect theme for my needs. The same...

If you're serious about scaling your company you should stop doing DevOps teams. I realise this is probably a controversial opinion and one I'm most likely almost alone in thinking, but it's something I've been thinking about a lot as of late. DevOps teams are developers and IT operations people who work together...

Tomorrow marks the first full month of my move to toot.community, a Mastodon instance initially set up by my friend Jorijn. My move to Mastodon wasn't motivated by what's going at Twitter right now, but rather the technical challenges of scaling the shit out of it. In the first week we welcomed thousands of people...