Infrastructure

Hardware gets kept because it runs what it’s always run, and the refresh conversation gets deferred because nothing appears broken. The ceiling only shows up when someone tries to do something new on top of it. I had that exact experience last Saturday trying to containerise the apps on my home server. The Plan I’ve been wanting to use containers more outside of just reading about them, so running them at home on something real was the obvious next step. Set up a git repo for version control, VS Code as the editor, and OpenAI’s Codex to handle the agentic coding tasks directly on the machine, so I had everything in place to move quickly on something I hadn’t done before. The plan was to start with one small component and see how it handled it before doing anything else. ...

I’m recertifying my AWS Solutions Architect Professional cert for the second time right now, so when I decided to build a personal site the temptation to go straight to Route53, CloudFront, S3, and Terraform was real. I asked ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini what they thought before starting, and while they disagreed on a few things they all said to use GitHub Pages and not overthink the hosting. Gemini included a cost comparison that had an EKS cluster as one of the options at £150-200/month, which is overkill for basically any website, but it helped make the point that GitHub Pages with a custom domain was the obvious starting point. I could have spent weeks on infrastructure before writing a single post, or I could just start writing. ...