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This week I was tasked with discovering what my core values are. The context around this was that I needed to understand what my core values are so that I can understand how they are being violated, in the hopes that I can understand how a disagreement was created with someone else. That got me thinking: what are core values? It’s nothing I’ve ever really thought about before. Sure, I know about honesty and timeliness, but I wasn’t aware of the full suite of core values. Where do I begin? ...

In a recent article, I added a code block for MermaidJS and found that neither Hugo nor my theme (PaperMod) would support MermaidJS. It rendered the code block as-is in raw form without converting it into a pretty diagram. I was able to add support for MermaidJS by making a very small change to how Hugo renders the page. Create a new file called layouts/partials/extend_head.html if it doesn’t already exist and paste in the following code: ...

I’ve been designing VPC architectures in AWS, conventional wisdom tells us to avoid overlapping CIDR blocks. Heck, every single company I’ve worked at has an infrastructure or network team beholden to this idea. The reasoning is straightforward: non-overlapping CIDRs allow you to connect VPCs via peering, Transit Gateway, or other networking constructs if needed later. But what if preventing that connection is exactly what you want? I have been given side eye for even suggesting this practice before, but hear me out. ...

Alternate title: So You’ve Found Yourself in a Security Incident I’ve attended, commanded and, yes, caused, many security incidents in my career. This is not an appeal to authority but, rather, an appeal to experience. Often we don’t have time to talk or teach about security incidents, so this document collects various tips and tricks I’ve encountered throughout the years. Please note that I’m not a lawyer, and do not dispense legal advice, so my focus will remain on information security and I may have to decline to answer your question. ...

Jira is such a lovely tool. Its search functionality requires you to understand JQL (Jira Query Language), which is a famously powerful and opaque language to help you find literally anything in its database of tickets. So you might have a need to find the tickets owned by someone who has left the company. That should be easy, right? Right? At first you’d think so, but then you don’t know Jira enough. Jira is only willing to help you when the users are active. For deactivated users – these are users with the (Deactivated) tag beside their name, you cannot find them in Jira by their username anymore. Here’s how to find them. I’ll be using a specific ex-employee in my screenshots as an example. ...

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! ...