If you don’t know a conference named PyconAU, you have no idea what you are missing. And I now finally had the energy to gather my thoughts about it.

Certainly the cloud is going to solve all our problems.

Recently, we came across a very unusual scenario.

My team needed a replica from production to run some performance tests. We took a snapshot and created another identical RDS instance based on said snapshot.

After the new RDS was available, we attempted to connect our application to it. To our surprise, the copied RDS was extremely slow; big queries that took less than 5 seconds in production were taking more than 60 seconds (or even timing out).

LCA has a special place in my heart.

It has been happening now for 20 years (!). This year it was in Christchurch, New Zealand. Nope, nothing weird about it, keep it cool.

In case you missed the announcement, AWS now allows stopping and starting multi-az RDS. That’s a pretty great feature!

Do you know how much time does it take to stop an RDS instance?

I purchased a yubikey a few months ago, as I needed a secure way to ‘carry’ by ssh private keys with me.

There are several tutorials on the internet, but none of them actually worked for me (on OSX). So let me write down all the steps I took, so my future self will know what to do.

If you think your problem is your CI tool, think again.

Chances are it’s just a knee jerk reaction. You probably have a problem with your pipelines.

You’ve probably heard the expressions ‘build as code’ and ‘infrastructure as code’, and I must admit they are my pet peeves.

They are terribly misnamed, and I’m sure I’m not the only one thinking like that.

When deploying infrastructure and applications, more frequently than not we have to deal with passwords, API keys, private keys and such. There are several approaches on how to handle them.

Mandatory first blog post.