I host this website and my Jenkins setup on AWS, and have detailed in the past how I automate the setup of this. However, running an EC2 24/7 to handle occasional CI builds for personal projects didn't seem like the best idea, and I wanted to see if I could save money by thinking the process through a bit. This explains how I used AWS lambdas to automate the started of an EC2 through the AWS CLI, and how to set this up within GitHub and Jenkins to drop your single EC2 instance bill by around 90-95%.

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A few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to speak at the first DevHub North post-pandemic about the journey so far at Tesco Bank Technology, and how far we've come in a few years.

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Or the tale of two Land Rover Discoverys... The final part of my car history, including what I'm driving around in today (correct as of August 2022).

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Continuing the last post, part 2 details some newer cars when I was having a little more of a "sensible" period, but that didn't last long...

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Since I started driving in 2007 I seem to have run through quite a few cars, and more than anything I wanted to get a little bit written on them in one place. I've had 14 cars over the years, 2 of which I still have. I tend to change them fairly often, but some I keep longer than others if I form a bit more of an affinity with them. Anyway, I thought a run through what I've had might be interesting for someone at the very least.

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Choosing the next version for your application or side-project can be a tricky process - when you do increase your major version, and what if your patch number is getting a little high? v1.0.0 looks a lot better than v0.1.567 but what's the best approach? I wanted a way of calculating the version automatically using commit messages and built some generic Groovy scripts that can be used in Jenkins builds to increment a version automatically when I merge a PR or push straight to main. This shows the code samples I've put together and how I've been using this privately up until now.

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After recent adventures in tackling Azure from the ground up with only AWS experience on hand, it's time to walk through some of the pros, some of the gotchas, and how to practically build a production-ready Kubernetes stack in Azure using Terraform.

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I explain how to use Docker with my a simple web server in Go, how that can be integrated that into a build pipeline in Jenkins to illustrate test results and code coverage.

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A guide to coupling a few using infrastructure as code and configuaration tools together to provide an effective, repeatable pattern for building instances both locally and remotely.

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A few ideas I've used over the years when working on projects outside of the day job, and how I try and stay motivated as I build them.

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