My alphabet soup: AI, GCP, AWS, IaC 🥣

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. ...

Until now, the blog I use to document my projects has been hosted on WordPress. To cut down on the cost of running my blog (and to complete a cool project), I’ve made my blog a static website. Most websites we visit are dynamic websites, meaning that a web server generates the site with content that can change and be interacted with by users. Static websites are the opposite, they display the same content for every user and are shown exactly as they are written (usually using HTML). ...

Once you get past your first “Hello World” Python script, it’s good to learn how to use Python methods and classes. Methods and **functions **are a self-contained block of code that can be reused over and over. There are built-in functions that beginners in Python may already be familiar with, like print() and sum(). A user can also define a function (called a user-defined function) that executes a task they need done in their script multiple times. This is especially useful because it keeps the user from having to write that same chunk of code repeatedly. Variables that exist outside of the function can be passed to the function as parameters, but they are not required. The format of defining your own function is below: ...