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If you’ve ever joined me on a Teams call from my home office, you’ve likely noticed the wall of vinyl records behind me. This post aims to answer the most common questions I get on calls, offering a glimpse into my music collection and the technology used to play it. The Collection My vinyl collection is more than just a backdrop; let me give you a tour: The Main Attraction The wall you see behind me during video calls is just the beginning: ...

I have been reading a lot about CrewAI recently and as it was a long weekend I decided to tip my toe in the water and do something with it, but what? About a year ago, while bored, I added a Python script to this blog which used the OpenAI API to write a blog post based on what I had listened to the previous week using data from Last.FM↗ . ...

As mentioned in a post a few months ago I have been working on a book about the various ways you can approach monitoring your Docker containers, I am proud to announce that it was published today by Packt Publishing↗ . You can order your copy from the Packt website↗ or Amazon↗ . A free sample of the book can be found here↗ .

Last night I did some I haven’t done for a while and watched the opening episode of a new Dragons Den↗ series while it was being aired. After a short time I found myself less interested in what was happening on screen and more interested in what was happening to the contestants (this is after all a primetime game show isn’t it?) websites during what should be a predicted spike in traffic. ...

As someone who deals with the word “Cloud” as part of their day job it can get very confusing. When a client or colleague says “I want cloud” or “what about hosting it in the cloud” what does it mean? Well, in my line of work it could mean any of the following …. Virtual Machines hosted on a highly available hardware platform Instances hosted in a an auto-scaling available configuration Using Content Delivery Networks (CDN) for content Uploading static content Distributed Object Storage Software as a Service (SaaS) Platform as a Service (PaaS) Thats only a small list of what services which the word “Cloud” is used for. What makes things even more confusing is when I try and explain to friends and family what actually I do their only points of reference for “Cloud” are advertisements like this one from IBM …. ...

As mentioned in a previous post I tend to send most articles I am interested in reading to Pocket↗ so I can read them when I have time. Here is a selection of the most interesting “stuff” I have bookmarked over the last month or so …. How I Reverse Engineered Google DocsTo Play Back Any Document’s Keystrokes↗ A Flock of Tasty Sources on How to Start Learning High Scalability↗ AWS Best Practices — Enterprise Perspective↗ A Rare Peek Into The Massive Scale of AWS↗ Distributed systems for fun and profit↗ Post Mortem: The One Where We Accidentally DDOSed Ourselves↗ Docker in Production — What We’ve Learned Launching Over 300 Million Containers↗ SimCity That I Used to Know↗

Its been an interesting few weeks. I woke up one morning to find around 70 emails, most of them from Twitter saying a tweet I had been mentioned in had been favorited, this was the source …. .@docker, Fig, @nginx Reverse Proxies and #CentOS 7 https://t.co/Eenl8b1g9r by @RussMckendrick via @mediaglasses — Docker: Build 39X Faster (@Docker) October 13, 2014 …. yay. After spending a fews months talking about Docker↗ at work↗ it was good to get a mention. Also I got mentioned in the Docker Weekly News Letter↗ . Also this happened a few weeks later …. ...

I just noticed that the first post on this blog was made exactly a year ago today. While the layout and blogging engine has changed and I have not posted for extended periods of time happy birthday to me.