Knowledge-Management

A website serving Windows Server 2019 was returning the correct pages to every human who visited, to Bing, and to Yandex, and Thai casino spam to Googlebot alone. The admin who posted about it had spent days inside the box looking for the cause. They checked web.config, the URL rewrite rules, the HTTP redirects, the custom error pages, the IIS handlers and modules and ISAPI filters, robots.txt, the sitemap, and then ran findstr across every drive for the spam domain and the casino keywords. All of it came back clean. The same behaviour showed up on multiple unrelated sites on the same server, which ruled out a single compromised application and pointed at something sitting underneath all of them. ...

Three apps can still mean one underlying answer. I was heading to the ExCeL the morning after a tube strike, when the tubes were meant to be running again, and I had a session I wanted to catch. The boards outside the station said the trains were running soon, so I waited, switching between Citymapper and Google Maps to work out which one to believe. A woman walking past told me not to bother. She’d been standing at another station where the boards said the same thing and nothing had come, so she’d given up and was getting the bus. I ended up on a bus that didn’t go all the way, then the Elizabeth line, and the whole thing took far longer than I’d planned for a journey that was meant to be simple. ...

The system can keep running long after the reasoning behind it has left. You can’t test it, because the only place it runs is production, so you read the logs and you sit with someone while they do their job with it and build up a picture of what it does from the outside. The customer said it pulls from the billing platform on a schedule, but the logs say it pushes on a trigger, the connection string points at a host that isn’t on the network diagram, and the job everyone calls the nightly sync runs four times a day. At one point the worker does a step that makes no sense, and when you ask why, the answer is that’s just how it’s always done. It takes time and the picture you end up with is nothing like the description, but you get there. ...

I’d written off Claude Cowork before I’d really used it. What changed my mind was having to demo it as part of some cross-company AI training I’m running, which meant finding a reason for it to exist for people who weren’t me. When I went looking for ways to show it to non-technical colleagues, I found things it could do for them that I’d never have looked for on my own behalf. One of them had a job that meant reconciling the same information across three systems, pulling it out of a CRM, checking it against a spreadsheet, then cross-referencing email to confirm the spreadsheet was actually up to date. It took them a good chunk of time every time they did it. By the end I had a flow that did the whole thing on a single click, and none of that was something I’d have gone looking for if I weren’t trying to make the tool make sense to someone else. ...

The biggest change I made for this AWS recert isn’t which AI I’m using, it’s that I moved my study notes out of OneNote and into Notion. Back in March I wrote about studying with custom GPTs for the AI Practitioner. The note-creation GPT had grown a system prompt that read like a software spec, the coaching one had stayed simple and useful, and the post ended with me saying I’d try Claude as a study partner for the SA Pro and figure out whether to move my notes out of OneNote. ...

A P1 landed mid-morning with no context, the person who’d been handling it was off without a handover, and there were already several people on the call waiting for something to happen. The customer had been sitting with the issue for a while before we got involved, and what I had to work from was basically nothing. I started from scratch, kept it simple and worked up from there, and had it resolved within half an hour. The fix was something I’d documented two years earlier: Windows blocking files downloaded from the internet, unblocked via PowerShell, and I only found it because I’d written it down. ...

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. ...