Introduction # On the face of it this is a fairly pedestrian post subject. The devil, of course, is in the details. Here I wanted to deploy a new EKS cluster, with Prometheus and Grafana, cleanly and with good architectural domain boundaries. I am using the open source self-hosted stack, not the managed versions in this exercise. I also deployed using Open Tofu. The code and the short version is HERE.

This evening one of the the big conversation pieces on Tech Twitter is Arc Search and their ‘Act II of the internet’ launch video: “Our vision for Act II of Arc Internet pic.twitter.com/1RidKJVYUX” - Josh Miller February 1, 2024 Commenters are talking about what this means for Google and their ’ten blue links’ but I think there are some lessons from history that might be worth considering here and some examples that may give us an idea of what to expect next.

Recently I attempted a Python challenge on HackerRank - ‘The Minion Game’. My curiosity was piqued and I wanted to find out if the odds were as stacked as I initially thought. I was surprised that this wasn’t already established publicly and so I worked it out ‘myself’. The Game # The initial task was to complete code to calculate Kevin and Stuart’s scores programmatically for this game (I believe this description is free to reproduce)- via ChatGPT:

This is a follow-up article to one I published in June 2023 - ‘Writing my own (Python) study course with ChatGPT - part 1’. This discusses a more structured and disciplined approach with reflective practice and constructive critique as part of learning and improvement. What changed? # I had been searching for, sometimes random, exercises. Whilst discussing the first article (above) during a job interview, an interviewer suggested that Code Golf might be a good alternative to the sometimes complex and advanced challenges given in ‘Advent of Code’.

introduction # Hashicorp recently made shock licensing changes to their stack to close their source code to ‘competitors’. There has been much public comment and Open Terraform has already been announced in response. I see a strong future for OpenTF and a move towards Terraform itself being less used directly and more as an intermediate layer or stage for higher level tools as the gap that it occupies shrinks, as detailed below.

I’ve written previously about using ChatGPT to provide Artificial Intelligence (‘AI’) support for coding and tutoring in unfamiliar areas. What about using it on home turf, i.e. in an area with which I am familiar- in this case a Terraform module for generic use? (W)here’s the Code # It’s not necessary for following the below article but the code is published on GitHub and in the Community module registry Background # Recently I was tasked, in a consultancy capacity, with providing a Terraform module for a (generic) AWS IAM Role for private/team use.

Introduction # I’ve previously written about writing applications with ChatGPT. Now I am writing about using ChatGPT as a coding tutor. Background # I have always struggled to find application software coding projects to improve with. I’ve not been driven primarily in that space, but as a result I have struggled to improve my coding chops. I do get to do some ‘proper coding’ in the day job but it is occasional and limited.

This article demonstrates how to use Terraform features new in February 2023 to comprehensively manage permission set assignments in AWS Single-Sign-On / IAM identity Centre across accounts and by Organizational Unit. Note on Naming # ‘AWS Single-Sign-On’ is a descriptive but fairly cumbersome name. In 2022 AWS decided to re-brand it to ‘IAM identity Center’, which IMO is confusing. For the sake of brevity in this article I am referring to both interchangeably as ‘AWS-SSO’

Recently I wrote about writing a Golang application with a conversational Artificial Intelligence service - ChatGPT. This is a follow on article about trying to use a similar approach for testing. I am not presuming a familiarity with Golang for this article or claiming a high degree of expertise in it myself. The code discussed in both articles is here. Context # I won’t repeat what I said previously about being a platform engineer, but one area where the discipline often differs from application software development is unit tests.

A new conversational Artificial Intelligence service - ChatGPT - has been making waves this week. I tried using it for a small coding project and was impressed. I think it has some profound implications for the software industry. (W) here’s the code # Of course it would be daft to not make the code discussed available so here it is with builds published for: darwin-amd64 darwin-arm64 linux-amd64 windows-amd64 Background # I’m a Platform Engineer.