I recently spent a week integrating Cloud Code into my workflow. I didn’t go in with high expectations, but I came away with a significant concern that has nothing to do with the quality of the code itself.

The tool is undeniably impressive. I’ve been building scripts to generate graph definitions for our cloud network—essentially feeding a complex data structure into an LLM so it can reason about our infrastructure. With a detailed prompt, the AI handled the boilerplate and the logic with surprising accuracy.

However, the “success” of the tool highlighted a looming industry-wide issue: Synthetic Volume.

A few months ago, I was approached by a firm asking to become a consultant. I starting thinking about how I would run the whole practice. I decided to share this with the world.

Job hopping: the practice of switching jobs every few years. It’s becoming more and more common, especially among younger workers. For many of them, it’s the only way to get significant salary increases. There is obvious value in poor performing employees leaving your organization, but what about the high performing ones? I believe there is even more untapped value in those employees leaving.

I recently moved all my compute resources over to Spot Instances in AWS. I love it. If you’re not using Spot in your applications, I hope this will convince you to look into it.

At Arkiom, I led the migration from managed hosting in a datacenter in Utah to AWS. We were having problems with our hosting provider’s lackluster support and performing destructive maintenance without communication. I was working as a developer, but I had previous server admin experience, so I proposed we move. For the next 6 months, I performed cost analysis, provided migration plans, and configured the 15 servers we’d need for all our projects. One product at a time, I turned on the new servers, migrated the DNS, and shut down the old ones. The only hiccups we had were with our Federal clients who whitelisted our IPs. Small wrinkles ironed out, we were fully “in the cloud”.

Yesterday, while sharing a beer with my coworkers, we discussed an idea I’ve been kicking around for many years now. We joked and laughed while wondering aloud if anyone would be interested. Then, the name was coined: “DevOps Hell’s Kitchen”.

The premise is fairly simple. Two teams of software engineers compete in head-to-head challenges week after week. These challenges could be oriented around known computing problems or designed to educate. Things like “process a million messages from a queue” or “send billions of emails”. Every challenge is cost-bound, meaning the team that successfully completes the challenge in the time allotted, for the lowest cost, will be the winner. The losing team votes a person off the team.

I want to build static sites to capitalize on really cheap hosting via S3. I have probably a dozen sites I’ll host on here, so all solutions will be 10x more expensive. I also want to know if building a CI/CD platform on Lambda is feasible. With systems like Jenkins, it’s really hard to hit 100% utilization. Lambda gives us that possibility, provided this all works.

There are a lot of parts getting this whole thing set up.

I’m building static sites because they’re cheap, low maintenance, and highly performant. I’ve been running Wordpress sites for years, but they always seem to be more work than they’re worth. I get tired of applying updates and then fixing plugins. Hugo was recommended to me by a friend on Twitter. I’ve been working on using it ever since.