Recent content in Howdy on AaronEaton.com
We Built an AI-Powered Prompt Optimizer and It Taught Us We Were Solving the Wrong Problem 
 We built a system to rigorously test whether our AI instructions actually worked. Halfway through, we discovered our test environment had been handing the model its own answer key. 
 
 The Idea 
 Claude Code lets you package instructions into skills — persistent system prompts for specific…
This post was partly inspired by Sean Kilgore’s recent blog about Common Errors
in the Paved Path
metaphor . Sean’s
language mirrors a metaphor that surfaced within my team about our On-Call
Rotation. Sean contrasts the “paved path” an organization provides to its
developers with the “vehicles” each team puts on that path. My team talks…
Let’s Teach Crossplane to Play Poker 
 The Penguin Book of Card Games lists over 250 games which can be played with a standard deck of playing cards. Most of those games don’t require any changes to the deck. Blackjack, poker, gin, go fish, crazy eights, old maid… these games all use the same 4 suits of 13 ranks. 
 When we start composing infrastructure with Crossplane,…
Conformance Tests for Crossplane Configuration Packages 
 When crossplane
 graduated 
to Incubation status we published a
 conformance for crossplane and its
providers. I started to wonder if we could use the same tools and framework for
testing Configuration Packages, as well as Provider Packages. 
 A unified testing strategy for all crossplane packages could simplify…
Crossplane Package Development 
 Crossplane Packages, and specifically the Composition Engine, allow Platform
Teams to publish Composite Resources for use by Development Teams or Platform
Operators. The end result of a Crossplane Composition is always going to be a
set of valid YAML documents which define Crossplane Managed Resources. 
 Because the output of our compositions is…
Crossplane Package Test Loop 
 The test loop for Crossplane Packages is always going to be an end-2-end test in
a working kubernetes cluster. In order to validate that a package behaves as
desired, we must: 
 
 Access a Kubernetes Cluster 
 Install Crossplane and required providers on that cluster 
 Configure our Composite Resources (XRs) on that cluster 
 Submit a…
Writer 
 Do I write science fiction? I wear a watch that Dick Tracy never dreamed of and I’m typing this on a device that would look at home on Captain Picard’s desk. I write fiction about people trying to make sense of a world that runs on science. 
 Engineer 
 I’m a kubernetes fan boy and I will talk about it at parties if not monitored. 
 I’ve worked with…