I spent a couple of days migrating our monitoring stack from self-hosted kube-prometheus-stack (KPS) to GKE’s native Google Managed …

TLDR: VPA’s updater defaults to requiring 2 replicas before it will evict a pod. Single-replica deployments are silently excluded from …

TL;DR — I switched from an Apple Watch to a Garmin and wanted to bring my workout history with me. Apple’s data export turned out to be …

TL;DR: If Spotlight can’t find your apps, rebuild the Launch Services database with lsregister. It takes a few seconds and doesn’t require a …

TL;DR: jj (Jujutsu) is a Git-compatible version control system with some interesting ideas — automatic change tracking, universal undo, and …

TL;DR: Jetson Nano is old and stuck on Ubuntu 18.04-era software, but it’s still a great always-on host for bounded edge workloads like …

TLDR: Mutating admission webhooks that inject scheduling rules (nodeSelector, tolerations, affinity) persist on StatefulSet pods even after …

I use git worktrees heavily for parallel development. One worktree per ticket, across dozens of repositories. They’re especially useful if …

TL;DR: Feed your entire git log + file lists into a single LLM call to generate a bash hash map of conventional commit messages, then apply …

This is a follow-up to my original post, Installing OpenClaw on a Jetson Nano, where I got things working with Bun on Ubuntu 18.04. That …

TLDR: Go doesn’t auto-detect container memory limits. Without GOMEMLIMIT, the GC lets the heap double freely until the OOM killer strikes. …

I recently learnt something about BigQuery pagination that I wish I’d known sooner. If you’re paginating BQ results with LIMIT/OFFSET in the …

Happy lets you control Claude Code sessions from your phone. You run happy instead of claude, scan a QR code, and your session shows up on …

TLDR: If you manage SendGrid DNS records in Cloudflare, make sure PTR-related records are set to DNS-only. Proxying them silently breaks …

I migrated a few Python projects from Poetry to uv. The conversion is mostly mechanical, so this focuses on what changed and why it was …

TLDR: If your entrypoint script doesn’t use exec, SIGTERM never reaches your Python app and graceful shutdown silently does nothing. Docker …

TLDR: --mount=type=cache makes RUN layers non-deterministic. On ephemeral runners the mount is always empty, so BuildKit can’t match layers …

I have a Jetson Nano at home that I SSH into from my laptop. At home it’s on a local IP, but when I’m out I reach it via a public IP. I got …

The idea of messaging an AI assistant from my phone while I’m out walking and having it write code that I can steer — “try this approach …

I connected my Jetson Nano to an external projector and the console text was microscopic. The framebuffer was running at 3840x2160 (4K) on a …

TLDR: HPA handles horizontal scaling on CPU, VPA right-sizes memory. Split their concerns with controlledResources: ["memory"] so they don’t …

I needed to roll out the same GitHub Actions workflow change across a bunch of repositories. Doing it repo by repo via …

I needed to track daily Twilio costs in a spreadsheet. The Twilio console has usage data but no easy export, and I wanted it updating …

I wanted to pull data from a Google Sheet using curl and my existing gcloud credentials. Should be simple, right? The naive approach …

TLDR: Templating VPA minAllowed from deployment resource requests prevents VPA from reducing resources. Popular charts make these fields …

For four years I thought kubectl required gcloud auth login. But I also needed ADC for scripts and apps, so every time my tokens expired I’d …

A few days ago I cleaned up 200GB from my Mac and deliberately kept my Claude Code history at 2.3GB. Four days later it had grown to 9.5GB. …

I was updating my about page and wanted to add a timeline of places I’ve travelled to. I’ve got thousands of geotagged photos in my Photos …

My Mac was close to 100% full. macOS was complaining and I couldn’t install updates. Here’s how I used Claude to analyse my disk usage and …

I was setting up automated version bumps for a Python project using bumpver and uv. The problem: when bumpver updates the version in …

We had a dedicated “bot” user account for GitHub automation - creating PRs, pushing commits, merging branches. It worked, but it always felt …

I’ve accumulated hundreds of Claude Code sessions and kept losing track of where I solved specific problems. The built-in /resume shows …

I’ve been using Neovim full-time for a couple of years now. Here’s my current setup - built on LazyVim with a focus on Python development …

I’ve overhauled my Python development setup over the past year. The ecosystem has improved dramatically - faster tools, better defaults, and …

My Kubernetes workflow changed a lot this year. The biggest shift: I started using LLMs as a debugging partner. Combined with a few CLI …

This is Part 2 covering plugin development. Part 1 covers setting up Magento on Kubernetes. With Magento running on Kubernetes, you can use …

This guide covers deploying Magento 2.4.8 to Kubernetes with MariaDB and OpenSearch as sidecars. The key benefit: disposable environments. …

I use git worktrees constantly for parallel development, but typing git worktree list, copying the path, and cd-ing got tedious. So I wrote …

My disk was filling up with old Docker images. I got a low disk space warning and traced 80GB back to Docker. Here’s how to reclaim space. …

I was deploying a SvelteKit app to Cloudflare Pages and wanted to do it from the command line rather than connecting to GitHub. Wrangler …

I was doing planned maintenance on a Kubernetes cluster. Within seconds of starting the work, my phone was buzzing with PagerDuty alerts. I …

After installing gcloud, the gcloud command wasn’t found. The PATH wasn’t set up properly. This happened after I upgraded macOS and my shell …

I was debugging why HTTPS requests to app.example.com were failing with certificate errors. The certificate on the server was valid, but …

Using gh for PR work is much faster than the web UI, and allows staying in the terminal. It eliminates the need to constantly reach for the …

I started Advent of Code 2025. Here are some tips I’ve picked up. My solving workflow Link to heading Read the problem twice - I often miss …

I needed to check what was in a GCP secret to debug why an application wasn’t starting. Here’s how we inject secrets into GKE workloads, …

I left a container running over a long weekend and came back to find it had consumed 50GB of disk space with logs. The application was …

I needed to find my public IP to add it to a firewall allowlist. curl ifconfig.me That’s it. Returns just your IP address. Why you need to …

At 2am, I got an alert: database disk usage at 85%. Logged in, checked the usual suspects (tables, indexes, temp files), and everything …

I needed to connect to a Cloud SQL instance to debug a data issue. Here’s the quick way to get a psql session without fiddling with IP …

I use Docker Compose for local multi-service environments because it keeps runtime config in one file and makes startup/teardown repeatable. …

I needed to find all the places in our GitHub org that were using a deprecated GitHub Actions runner label. We were migrating from runs-on: …

I was debugging why a Kubernetes deployment wasn’t updating after merging a PR. The manifest was in git, but the cluster was still running …

I needed to scrape property listings from a real estate site that heavily relied on JavaScript to load content. The page source was empty …

TLDR: I built gkecc to generate cost-optimised GKE ComputeClass specs from live pricing data. It sorts by total cost (CPU + RAM), not just …

I was setting up a new Python project with direnv to manage environment variables. Suddenly python wasn’t found, even though it was …

TLDR: Start with default-src 'self' and add exceptions as needed. Use report-only mode first to avoid breaking your site. I added CSP to a …

I was getting warnings about pytest-asyncio decorators. Here’s the fix. Why async tests are tricky Link to heading Async tests need an event …

Pydantic v2 is a ground-up rewrite with a Rust core, and it shows - validation is noticeably faster. But the migration isn’t trivial. I …

I was evaluating Docusaurus as a replacement for our Redocly docs site. We had around 200 documentation pages and needed more flexibility …

FastAPI has a few defaults that make API services easier to maintain: request validation, typed contracts, and built-in docs. These are the …

GKE has four layers of autoscaling that work together: HPA, VPA, cluster autoscaler, and NAP. Understanding how they interact saves a lot of …

I was setting up Sentry for a new Python service. The first time I ran it locally without a DSN configured, the app crashed at startup. …

I was trying to figure out why my Helm chart wasn’t rendering correctly. A missing if condition meant a ConfigMap wasn’t being created in …

I’d been using HPAs for a while without really understanding them. They worked, so I never looked closely. Then I noticed a service was …

Pods were stuck in Pending and I couldn’t figure out why. kubectl describe showed “0/12 nodes are available: 12 node(s) had taint that the …

I needed to search Cloud Logging for specific events from the command line. The CLI is much faster than clicking through the Console when …

I hadn’t run brew upgrade in a couple of months and suddenly gh started failing with cryptic errors. Turned out I was three major versions …

I’d been working on a feature branch and accidentally committed a bug fix to it instead of main. The fix needed to go out now, but the …

When sharing quick Python scripts, the old workflow is usually: create a venv, install dependencies, and document setup steps. uv run …

TLDR: Certificate not ready? Check resources in this order: Certificate → CertificateRequest → Order → Challenge. The issue is usually at …

After migrating a project to uv, I noticed Dependabot PRs were still being created but CI was failing. Dependabot was updating …

I needed to connect to a PostgreSQL database for debugging production issues. After years of copying connection commands from Slack, I …

TLDR: git stash to save, git stash pop to restore. Use -m "message" if you’ll have multiple stashes. I was halfway through a refactor when …

I was debugging why a webhook wasn’t firing. The API was returning something, but staring at a wall of minified JSON in the terminal wasn’t …

I once pushed a commit that broke production. The fix was already in progress but would take an hour. git revert let me undo the damage …

I wanted Claude to help me manage Linear tickets without leaving my terminal. The Model Context Protocol (MCP) makes this possible. Here’s …

I started using tmux to keep terminal sessions running after disconnecting from SSH. Here’s what I use most. Quick session workflow Link to …

I spend too much time switching between my terminal and Linear’s web app. The Linear CLI lets me manage tickets without leaving my editor. …

I needed to download a bunch of files from a GCS bucket to process them locally. gcloud storage rsync does the job, and it’s noticeably …

I was investigating a production issue where a table column was missing. Turned out someone had merged a migration that dropped it without …

When an endpoint times out, I check DNS early to rule it in or out quickly. dig gives a fast sanity check before digging into app or network …

I was watching a deployment roll out and kept running kubectl get pods over and over like a nervous habit. Then I discovered watch and felt …

I spent 20 minutes staring at empty kubectl logs output wondering why a crashing pod had no errors. The container was restarting before I …

TLDR: My order is describe → logs -p → events → exec. Most failures show up in events or previous logs. When a pod is in CrashLoopBackOff, …

Rsync is reliable for repeat syncs, but small flag mistakes can be destructive. I use a dry-run-first workflow, especially with --delete. …

I once deployed a config change that crashed pods on startup. The rollout was halfway through before I noticed - half the replicas were …

I was working on a SvelteKit dashboard application and noticed the initial page load was sluggish. After investigating, I found we had over …

I was working on a legacy PHP WooCommerce plugin that had inconsistent formatting - some files used tabs, others spaces, brace styles were …

I was tired of catching trivial issues in PR reviews - trailing whitespace, missing newlines, formatting inconsistencies. Pre-commit hooks …

I run pytest a lot. Here are the flags I use most. My development workflow Link to heading When I’m writing code, I typically: Write the …

I was setting up GitHub Actions to deploy to GCP and needed to use workload identity instead of service account keys. Here’s how to manage …

I switched to Ruff because it’s ridiculously fast. On a ~50k line Python codebase, Flake8 + isort + pylint took about 45 seconds. Ruff does …

I migrated manually created GCP workload identity pools and GitHub repositories into Terraform so they could be managed consistently in …

I was constantly stashing changes to review PRs or fix urgent bugs on other branches. Stash, switch, fix, commit, switch back, pop stash, …

I stopped using find and grep ages ago. fd and rg (ripgrep) are faster and have better defaults. Switching to these was probably one of the …

I spent way too long trying to get uv publish to work with Google Artifact Registry. The docs suggest using keyring, but that led me down a …

I have been working on an Ethereum lottery Dapp with folks attending a meetup hosted by Strange Labs (Gloucester Road, Bristol - NOW CLOSED) …

I often log into a remote SSH terminal to use an ipython shell. In doing so, it is necessary for me look at figures invoked by matplotlib as …

I like MathJax. It does a great job displaying equations on web pages written using $\rm\LaTeX$. However, I recently wrote a Jekyll blog …

In the process of writing my thesis, I had to frequently check that I was not exceeding the word limit by running the following command: …

After installing TSS’s Aimsun 8.1.3 on Ubuntu 16.04 (x64 build) on my machine, I tried to launch the program. However, the icon would appear …

My presentation for Geomob in London:

Sometimes, the mundane assumes a surreal form and takes one by surprise. I had the pleasure of this encounter this morning and I felt the …

I love this song. Vegan solidarity! Here is the lyrics borrowed from this site: [Intro] Selamta (Greetings in Amharic) Ital (natural) we …

I have just set up a way to automatically log temperature using OSX terminal because my computer was frequently overheating and I wanted to …

Finding and deleting files and folders in OSX is simple. Open your terminal. In order to just find your files/folders (non destructive): For …

I had to convert lots of OSGB EPSG:27700 raster files to LonLat EPSG:4326 format and here is how I did it on my OSX terminal. I also wanted …

Say I have a list of objects called agents with 100,000 objects. I have a second list called agents_per_step which refers to 39,393 objects …

On 11 May, Bristol Green Party hosted a forum to discuss housing and energy at The Station in central Bristol. The meeting was chaired by …

On 10th March, Bristol People’s Assembly hosted People’s Question Time at City Road Baptist Church in Stokes Croft. In the panel were Rufus …

Another Angry Voice (AAV) aka Tom paid a visit to Bristol on 5th March. AAV introduced himself as a regular guy and emphasized that if he …

Previously, we tried to predict 90th percentile evacuation time $T{90}$ determined from ABM simulation using 90th percentile free flow …

I have just updated the website and finally acquired brtkwr.com for good which is now hosted on Github pages too which is an excellent free …