This is not so much of a SRE post, be ye warned, but it does discuss solving problems creatively. WARNING: Blindly following this will result in incurring costs from cloud providers, potentially quite a bit. It’s not my fault if you don’t calculate how much your task will cost. As an example, had I used AWS Comprehend for my sentiment analysis, I calculated the cost at ~$15,000. Why on earth would you need to know the gender of Github users, you ask?...

Because alliteration. Moving on. If you’re interacting with APIs of any kind regularly, you probably have the credentials saved somewhere. Maybe you’re already using a solution to securely store these, in which case congratulations, you’re better than most. I, for one, was not. I assuaged my guilt with the knowledge that my Mac’s disk encryption meant that they were protected, but the whole thing still felt icky. This was briefly discussed in Slack, and this method of dealing with the problem came up....

I’m not sure if this is common, but it should be - a second fridge. While ours ostensibly began its life for holding cakes (my wife is a home baker), it’s morphed into extra food, beer, and the like. It lives in our garage, which isn’t an ideal space for a fridge with respect to its lifespan, but it’s the only reasonable spot in the house we can fit it....

Anyone in the SRE/DevOps world is likely at least aware of Terraform, if not actively using it. While Pulumi’s ability to write IaC in Python seems lovely to me, my company uses Terraform, so HCL it is. If you aren’t familiar, I’ll give a brief overview. Terraform is an IaC (see link above) tool. You know how installing an OS from scratch requires human input? Everything from the partitioning scheme to what services to launch requires configuration....

What do you do if you want a private social media experience for you and friends or family? Facebook has Groups, and lesser-known apps like Band exist that can also fill that niche, but you’re still handing over all your content to a 3rd party. For some, that’s untenable, and completely understandable. Furthermore, I wouldn’t have anything of interest to write if the answer was “Make a Group. Now set it to Private....