I asked myself the other day why I bother writing at all. It’s a valid question. Given nowadays it’s the hip thing to question every last aspect of every last everything, I figured I’d give it a go.

Starting in my own spiritual back yard seemed as good a place as any to question the shiznit out of everything. Why not start with my fundamental and lifelong desire to be a writer?

CAUTION: If you’re the faint of heart, do NOT tug at that psychological thread. Danger, Will Robinson. Danger. Core tenets don’t like you messing with them. They tend…

We had finally taken the plunge. We were at last bailing on Bitbucket and moving over to GitHub.

I can’t express how absolutely thrilled we were.

I’m not going to bag on Bitbucket. It had served us well for many, many years. That said, by comparison to the amazing and wide-ranging features of GitHub, Bitbucket just couldn’t compete. Advanced security features, dependabot, a powerhouse of APIs and their CLI. It was, frankly, a no-brainer.

There was only one wee snag: We needed to migrate a number of Bitbucket Pipelines over to GitHub Actions.

GitHub Actions: A Primer

For those who don’t know, GitHub Actions…

Has this ever happened to you?

You open up an app’s source code, ready to do some dev work, and you’re immediately thrown off by some of the choices previous developers used to build the app? You aren’t sure why they chose to use this or that dependency injection framework. You can’t work out why the app is using a specific type of retry logic, or why they decided on Angular instead of React?

Sure, we all have. Thing is, when we build an app from the start, we often make decisions which to us seem obvious (we were part…

I was livid when I read the news. I knew it was coming, fellow Kiwis, but when it was made a reality, I fumed a good solid day.

Larry Page, the Google billionaire, has gotten himself and his family major special treatment from the New Zealand government on their wealth alone.

It seems not only was he handed residency like a bag of jaffas, but his family received unheard-of special treatment during a pandemic. …

Let me start with a cosmic horror confession: I never really found Cthulhu all that scary.

Sure, in the short story “The Call of Cthulhu”, we bear witness to the giant city of R’lyeh beneath the furthest reaches of the South Pacific. Built of unfathomable angles on a mind-twisting cyclopean scale, it is horrific geometry, black, jagged stone, and the awful hint of its foul denizens lurking in the dripping shadows. That’s damn cool.

Yet once Lovecraft looses Cthulhu on us, I never really got the horror I was supposed to feel.

“A pulpy, tentacled head surmounted a grotesque and…

I knew the meaning of Silos and Fiefdoms long before I heard those terms spoken aloud.

Because I’d already seen them in action.

Having worked as an employee of numerous IT companies over the years, as well as having been a consultant for some big-name government and corporate gigs, I’d seen silos and fiefdoms up close and personal. When someone finally put a name to them, it was an aha! moment for little old me. “So that’s what they’re called!”

If you’re not familiar with these terms, perhaps I can give you a similar aha! moment. Sadly, IT Silos and…

If you’re not running your production web traffic through HTTPS, you’re clearly doing something wrong.

Everyone runs their production applications through HTTPS and TLS. Most browsers won’t even let you navigate to a website without these.

Security matters, after all. Would you trust a website which wasn’t running HTTPS?

It used to be setting up and configuring HTTPS was like a journey into Dante’s Inferno. Each machine had to be painstakingly installed with and then configured to use certificates, which was a logistical nightmare if you had a fleet of servers.

Those days, clearly, are long gone.

In many cases…

Configuring the AWS CLI is easy peasy

If you or your company are using AWS for cloud services, you clearly are using the AWS

AWS cli. If you’re not, well you should be.

AWS makes it easy enough to authenticate your account with the cli no matter which operating system you use.

In effect, you have one or more profiles configured on your local workstation which have all the details needed to access your AWS account. …