ORAS for Configuration Management

A challenge for any engineering team is handling configuration management in a secure and efficient way. Recently, I’ve explored using ORAS (OCI Registry As Storage), a tool which enhances OCI (Ope Container Initiative) registries by enabling them to store various artifacts, not just container images. What is ORAS? ORAS is an open source project which builds tools and libraries to enable using OCI registries to store any type of artifact, not just container images. Continue reading

Managing a Motorsport Club - My Initial Thoughts

Last year, I decided to run for a position on the management committee of the motorsport club I’m a member of. It has been eye-opening to see what goes on to run a club with around 100 members. Here’s a few things I’ve learned over the last 9 months. It’s a thankless task You’re damned if you do, and you’re damned if you don’t. You won’t keep everyone happy, and you just have to try and do the best job you can do. Continue reading

Motorsport Officiating

A part of my life that I haven’t written about before is my volunteer motorsport officiating. I’ve loved motorsport for as long as I can remember. Some of my earliest memories are watching the Bathurst 1000 or the Formula 1 Australian Grand Prix from Adelaide on television. My parents were not motorsport nuts, but I did go to the Gold Coast Indy 300 in the early 1990s. We would often drive past Surfers Paradise International Raceway and the little Go-Kart track there, but we were always going somewhere else. Continue reading

A simple static blog comments system using Cloudflare Workers and D1

I’ve spent the last couple of weeks off work, which has given me time to tinker with some different tech. For starters, I migrated this blog over to Hugo, a static site generated written in go. I’ve never had comments on this version of my blog, but I wondered how difficult it might be to roll my own system using Cloudflare Workers? This seemed like a good opportunity to play with one of Cloudflare’s newest offerings, D1. Continue reading

Infrastructure as code with Terraform

Over the last couple of months I’ve been working on a project for a containerised orchestration platform using Infrastructure as Code. This has meant I’ve spent most of my time working with Terraform. What is Terraform? I could write a couple of paragraphs about what Terraform is and what it does, but I think they put it best: Terraform is an open-source infrastructure as code software tool that provides a consistent CLI workflow to manage hundreds of cloud services. Continue reading

Using pyodbc in AWS Lambda functions

This week I was working on an AWS Lambda function that needed to read and write from a legacy Microsoft SQL database. It’s written using the AWS Chalice framework and in local testing everything looked great. Not so much when we needed to deploy it to AWS for testing. Why? Most of the time that you include a python package for use in a lambda function, Chalice is able to package that into the deployment, and you’re good to go. Continue reading