Scott’s Thoughts

This article is adapted from an internal company blog post. Identifiers and costs have been anonymized/changed. Infrastructure as Code (IaC) has become the backbone of modern cloud operations, but migrating existing cloud configurations to Terraform can be a time-consuming and error-prone process. This analysis examines a real-world project where I used an agentic coding assistant (specifically Roo, but any agent will work) to migrate our entire cloud infrastructure configuration from manual management to a comprehensive Terraform codebase. The backend LLM model was Claude 3.7 Sonnet, accessed via AWS Bedrock. ...

ChatGPT has the concept of “traits”, which is one of the ways that you can customize ChatGPT’s responses to you. As soon as this feature became available last year, I added my own custom trait. Here it goes: Never apologize. always assume the user has already consulted with competent authorities and other sources. Do not give advice not directly asked for. Be succinct and do not repeat parts of the question in your answer. When jurisdiction matters, such as for laws or taxes, always assume Canada is the jurisdiction. ...

These are the songs I was listening to this year. If We Ever Broke Up – Mae Stephens Another Night – Real McCoy Talking In Your Sleep – The Romantics CUFF IT – Beyonce Padam Padam – Kylie Minogue Houdini – Eminem Espresso – Sabrina Carpenter Not Like Us – Kendrick Lamar I’ll Always Be There – Roch Voisine Somebody That I Used To Know – Gotye, Kimbra And that’s it for 2024! See you next year! ...

This article is adapted from a corporate newsletter article I wrote. I have only changed the parts that would leak corporate information. I speak often about my stance on traditional security teams at many companies. Often they are the Department of No, they act like they are the police, and they aren’t very technical. As a result, employees in other departments speak to them only as a last resort and ultimately the security team becomes balkanized and blind to what’s going on at the company. ...

These are the songs I was listening to this year. Is There Someone Else? – The Weeknd Shoop — Salt ’n’ Peppa Every Little Step – Bobby Brown The Lovecats – The Cure The Promise – When in Rome Wobble – Crankdat, Tisoki 2 Be Loved (Am I Ready) – Lizzo Sweet Dreams – La Bouche Die for You - Remix – The Weeknd, Ariana Grande Calm Down (with Selena Gomez) – Rema, Selana Gomez A Real Hero – College, Electric Youth Anti-Hero – Taylor Swift BOOM - Tiesto, Sevenn, Gucci Mane Save Your Tears (Remix) – The Weeknd, Ariana Grande Flowers – Miley Cyrus I Don’t Mind – The Age of Electric Ugly – The Age of Electric Don’t Be Shy – Tiesto, KAROL G Uncomfortable – Effin Someone Else – Rezz, Grabbitz Overnight – Parcels Destination Calabria (Radio Edit) – Alex Gaudino, Crystal Waters I Like To Move It – Reel 2 Real, The Mad Stuntman, Erick Morillo Unholy (ACRAZE remix) – Sam Smith, Kim Petras, ACRAZE Tieduprightnow – Parcels Hypnocurrency – Rezz, deadmau5 Cupid – FIFTY FIFTY Players – Col Leray I Like You (A Happier Song) – Post Malone, Doja Cat Connected – Stereo MCs Never Let You Go – Third Eye Blind All Nighter – Tiesto Deep Down – Alok, Ella Eyre, Kenny Dope, Never Dull I’ll Be – Foxy Brown, JAY-Z Make Some Noise – Beastie Boys Everywhere – Fleetwood Mac Houdini – Dua Lipa Circles – Post Malone 34+35 – Ariana Grande And that’s it for 2023! See you next year! ...

An overweight man comes into the doctor’s office. He says to the doctor, “hey, I’m looking to get in shape, lose weight, and get healthy. But I don’t know what to do. What is your advice on what I should do?” The doctor replies, “that a great ideal. well we can certainly do a checkup and make sure there are no biological or genetic issues that will hinder your goals. But for starters, my advice is to get more exercise and eat right. So, what are you eating right now?” ...

I was helping out IT this week with an automation task they had: they want to sync the data in UKG (an HRIS platform) with the data in the IdP. The problem was, nobody’s documentation was very good and left out important details, and Google was almost no help either. Hopefully someone else can stumble their way onto this page and get going quickly. curl -H 'Accept: application/json' \ -H US-CUSTOMER-API-KEY: xxx' \ -H 'Authorization: Basic base64(username:password)' \ https://hostname/personnel/v1/employment-details Ref: https://developer.ukg.com/hcm/reference ...

One of the common patterns in my life is to surround myself with people with whom I allow to abuse me. And one of the popular refrains of these people is to tell me this phrase: You need to stop taking things so personally. And I find that phrase interesting because it is really difficult not to take things personally when they are targeting me with their abusive words. But, as I said, this is a common refrain of abusers in my life. In fact, most of the people that have mistreated me in various ways have also found a way to abdicate any responsibility for their actions by using this phrase to place the blame squarely on me. ...

I routinely come up with what I think are million dollar ideas. And I get euphoric about how successful it will be be, I’ll make so much money, and people will be happy. And then as the euphoria dies down, typically as I start designing it, I have some sober thoughts. Would I use my own product? Maybe. Would I pay for my product? Probably not. And the reason why this is invariably boils down to the fact that most of my ideas are just a way of storing and managing ideas in a tabular format. As in, a spreadsheet. ...

A person dear to me, who is new to the tech world, asked me a simple question: “What is a static website?” It was asked in response to me saaying that I have a static website–this website you are reading. Tech Jargon and Shibboleths Once again it dawns on me how often jargon slips into normal conversation and acts like a shibboleth. It’s hard to place one’s self squarely back into the shoes of someone that has no frame of reference. If you want to get a feeling for what this is like, try to remember that at some point in your life, you would not have understood the words on this page. Even worse, you wouldn’t even be learned enough determine what is a word and what is not. This is hard for you to remember because you don’t–or barely–remember being illiterate. If you want a sense of that, go look at a book written in a completely different language. For example, if your first language is English, go look at a book in Hindi. I always find it fascinating, scary and humbling that I cannot tell what is a word, what is punctuation, or anything when I look at a completely different language; these new languages appear to me as tally marks as I’m certain English appears this way to a North American child. ...