Infrastructure

My old Windows laptop started shutting itself down in the London flat during one of the Covid heatwaves. It had enough CPU for what I was asking it to do, Windows still booted and the applications still opened, but the machine could not keep itself inside its thermal limits in the room. Cleaning the fans and repasting the CPU were the fixes that still felt mechanical, the sort of thing you could do with a small screwdriver, a tube of thermal paste and the belief that dust or bad contact was the problem. ThrottleStop came after that, because by then I was trying to get more control over the Dell’s CPU throttling and power behaviour when it hit its limits, before it decided the situation was unsafe and shut itself down. The cooling pad helped a bit, but only in the way extra airflow helps when the air being pushed around is already too warm. ...

Nobody defers a hardware refresh because they think the replacement will be cheaper later, they defer it because the thing still works and there’s never quite a reason to spend the money. That used to be a free position to hold. I keep deciding not to replace my home machine, the same 2013 i5-4670K I wrote about when I couldn’t containerise my home server, and it still runs everything I ask of it, which is exactly why spending anything on it feels hard to justify. What’s changed since I last wrote about it is that the floor under the replacement is rising while I sit here not making the decision. ...

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. ...