My alphabet soup: AI, GCP, AWS, IaC 🥣

You know, when I started this blog to document my home lab adventures and tech projects, I never thought I’d be writing about yarn and knitting needles. But here we are, and honestly? Some of my most satisfying “builds” lately have been analog ones. There’s something deeply therapeutic about working with your hands on physical projects when you spend most days wrestling with Docker containers and network configurations. The Cutest Quality Assurance Engineer ...

I’ve recently started using Claude — specifically the Claude Code CLI — and it’s already changed how I manage this blog. Instead of manually writing posts and running git commands, I can now just describe what I want and Claude handles the rest: writing the post, building the site, committing, and pushing to GitHub. It’s pretty wild. To get started I picked up a Claude Pro subscription, which is required to use Claude Code — the free tier doesn’t include it. Totally worth it. Here’s how to get it set up on a MacBook Air. ...

After running a clean, minimal Ghostwriter theme for some time, I recently migrated this site to Hugo-PaperMod. The goal was better performance, built-in dark mode, improved mobile responsiveness, and easier customization while keeping the lightweight blogging feel. What is Hugo? Hugo is a fast, open-source static site generator written in Go. Unlike traditional CMS platforms (WordPress, Ghost, etc.), Hugo compiles Markdown content, templates, and assets into plain HTML, CSS, and JS files at build time—no database, no server-side runtime. This results in blazing-fast page loads, strong security (no attack surface), low hosting costs, and easy version control via Git. ...

Networking in GCP, or any cloud environment, often requires a load balancer(LB). If you try to use Terraform to deploy a load balancer in GCP you’ll notice that there is not a single Terraform resource to create a GCP LB. GCP provides example Terraform scripts to create LBs in their documentation here. However, if you have an understanding of how load balancers work internally, and how to properly structure your Terraform code, creating your own LB modules in GCP using Terraform is possible. This can allow you to configure your LBs to do exactly what you need. ...

In this post: What is Ansible Installing Ansible Authentication Inventories Playbooks Testing Ansible What is Ansible? Ansible is an open-source infrastructure as code tool provided by Red Hat. Instead of agents, Ansible relies on SSH to pass tasks defined in YAML to remote machines. To get familiar with Ansible, I created a simple scenario where a bash script needed to be uploaded to a remote machine and ran periodically. ...

In this post: Intro JSON File CSV File Python Script Writing the Python Script I was recently tasked with automating the replacement of key:value pairs in a JSON file. The goal was to take the output of a CLI command listing key:value pairs and place those keys/values in specific places within a JSON file. I decided to convert the output of the CLI command to a CSV file and have a python script use that CSV to create a new JSON file with updated keys/values. ...