Recent content on Gonzalo's thoughts
Some tips for Windows EKS node startup time As I’ve mentioned before, we use Windows nodes (and Linux as well) in our build cluster.
A Linux EC2 instance might take 2 minutes from start until it joins an EKS Kubernetes cluster.
PowerShell issues in Containerd v2 This is not a great post with a great solution. It is just a post for someone who might be desperate and needs some ideas
I’m optimistic A few days ago I read this eerie fiction story about the risks of AI personal assistants, automation and self-improving loops.
Then, a couple of days later, I read this post from Dario, the founder of Anthropic/Claude, about the risks of AI.
Discovering agents This week I followed an interesting course on AI agents.
Many of you might have heard about agents. I had heard about agents, but I hadn’t looked into them in serious detail 😳, and this course has been eye-opening.
LLM-scaffolding A couple of weeks ago, I went to an event about AI and trading. The usual “oh yes, AI is great, it is going to change everything.” But almost every speaker said something along the lines, “but it won’t be a chat app.
Email Whispery After Xowit and Kids Xowit, the third experiment of the year is up.
It’s called Email Whispery.
It produces brief email summaries in an audio format.
You give temporary access to your email account (yes, I know it is a big ask, and I wouldn’t use such an app).
Kids-Xowit A couple of months ago I mentioned that I wanted to keep experimenting.
At that point I had launched Xowit. Xowit is something I want to keep exploring and I have another two updates in the works with natural language discovery, and in-app reading.
ASL-3 You might have read that the most recent model from Anthropic, Claude Opus 4 might resort to blackmail if told it will be removed.
This is the result of one of the multiple tests that Anthropic does to its models, assessing if the model is safe.
I’m always full of ideas.
But they never go beyond ideas.
Sometimes I would buy a domain and promise myself that “this is the one”. And the list of domains grows.
[Really dull post about virtualization in Windows]
For the last couple of months, I’ve been (on and off) working with others in a project to migrate development environments so that we developers can use both virtual machines with Vagrant+Hyper-V AND WSL.
Deeplens, is it dead? I’ve got a Deeplens. It was a gift that I received when I left my previous company. I played with it for a while when I got it.
A really small post to document a fix to an issue.
We were getting the following error in the logs of a docker container running elasticsearch that was being used by Graylog.
A few months ago I heard for the first time the term low-background steel.
It seems steel produced before the Second World War is more valuable for certain applications. The reason is steel produced after the first nuclear tests was contaminated with traces of nuclear material from those tests in the atmosphere.
A few days ago, while working on my post about how y=x3 might be a good activation function, I discovered an issue with tensorflow-metal, the python package to use your GPU in Tensorflow on a Mac.
UPDATE: It turns out it was not crazy at all.
These days I’m trying to learn Machine Learning(once again).
I’m more interested in understanding the fundamentals than running the race of prompt engineering and “ChatGPT” (and what is called LLM).
A happy user I joined Monzo in 2016.
Ex-Monzo user 4956.
I even interviewed with Tom Blomfield, former CEO of Monzo in 2014 when he was still with Anne Boden, former CEO of Starling.
Improving Windows build times in EKS I cannot believe a year has passed since my last annotation (which was also EKS and Windows related).
One of our most recent projects has been moving most of our build infrastructure to the cloud.
Windows 2022 in EKS Update: This article is no longer relevant. AWS already has Windows 2022 optimized images
Update 2: Thank you John for your kind message
If you are using Windows in EKS, you are probably eagerly awaiting for an Windows 2022 AMI.
Debugging windows nodes in EKS After a couple of days dealing with windows nodes in Kubernetes AWS EKS, I thought I would provide a quick write-up of what I’ve seen. For two reasons
Single instance with persistent EBS Sometimes you only want a single instance in AWS. But you know that everything fails, and you assume that your machine will fail too. You have your backups in place, but you have some data on disk that you would rather keep.
NAT Gateway A quick intro in AWS networking In AWS, it is very common to create your own isolated network, in what is called a VPC (from virtual private cloud). The official (more like general perception) way of doing it, involves having multiple public and private subnets.
New trend My daughters call me a senior and boomer. I’m more a GenX’er, but I pick my battles.
They are finishing their first year at uni, so they are in the perfect spot to all the new trends.
This post is a basic copy of this AWS page on how to create an AWS account. But it took me a while to understand all the steps (because I cannot read), so I’m just writing so that the next time I can remember.
I’ve decided I’m going to start writing again, even small things.
This week I was trying to create a Kubernetes cluster using Kops. In the end it didn’t work (mainly because it uses a Classic LoadBalancer and we don’t have public IPs in that VPC)
[This is mostly a translation of this other article in Spanish that I wrote for people in Spain. I’m not a politician, nor epidemiologist. If you live in the UK you may find better info elsewhere.
Yes. I feel your pain. That little bar at the bottom of your screen is no longer visible after you upgraded to macOS Catalina.
Well, here I am, to help you before Apple does.
Introduction A few weeks ago there was an attack on Capital One’s AWS infrastructure that lead to the compromise of personal information on around 100M people.
AWS is putting great effort in avoiding S3 buckets configured for public access.
I’ve been doing some research on credentials compromise and abuse in AWS. In the process, it was obvious that the main mitigation would be (is) to minimise the permissions assigned to the EC2 instance profile, applying the “least privilege principle”.
These days I’m reading a fascinating book on Roman History called SPQR. And I’ve discovered Roman History is full of lessons for today’s world.
As a small token, a line from Plautus, a Roman writer, that appeared in some of his books.
UPDATE: A few days after publication, the documentation now includes some examples. Well done, Atlassian.
Most people in the software industry know Jira. For better or for worse, it’s the most used product for managing tickets, requests, bugs…
For many people not living in the UK, it will come as a surprise that the railway system in London is quite expensive and provides a really bad service.
Train service is not a theme park.
I enjoy buying books.
I read physical books too.
I enjoy starting them.
Honestly, finishing books is more difficult for me. But I’ve been trying to improve on that.
I was very excited when I bought ‘1776’ by David McCullough.
I’ll start sharing a secret.
I want to launch a business.Yes, I know many people in the tech industry are in the same situation. They’ve got some burning idea to launch or some dream to fulfil.
Dear recruiter,
Thank you for contacting. At the moment I’m not looking for a job.
Kind regards,
Gonzalo
This is a bit impersonal.
I know. I’m sorry. The alternative is the above email for everyone.
You’ve probably seen the video presentation about Google Duplex, the new assistant created by Google that can make phone calls that sound totally human interactions to the human on the other side (and to anyone listening).
One of the things less obvious for anyone trying to setup Cloudwatch alarms is the treatment of missing points.
You create an alarm, to detect too many 5xx errors in your ELB.
This is a story for my friend C. He didn’t know what was behind this old tweet
TFW when after two months of silence the guy contacts you, promises to send an email immediately and fails to deliver.
If you don’t know who is Jack Ma, he’s the founder and CEO of Alibaba, the marketplace and reportedly the richest person in Asia. I must confess he’s always amazing me.
TLDR; VR on macOS means beta, crashes, unusable WebVR, and no games. But you get to learn a lot. This post explains my experience.
It seems this time I’m one of the few non-professionals that has bought an HTC Vive and a Mac after June’s keynote.
I have a two year old mid-level Android phone (Moto G 2015) not capable of using Google Cardboard. My tablet is an iPad Mini “1” with iOS9 because it can no longer be upgraded.
For the last month or so I’ve been running a small experiment in my Linkedin profile. I had been receiving contacts from recruiters offering roles, and from recruiters offering developers.
In the late 90s there was some craziness in the air. Everybody perceived Internet was going to transform our lives. But we didn’t know how. Companies tried to grow at all costs, setting up what looked like crazy ideas.
For many people, disruption in Financial Services are new banks that are building the platform from the ground up. Not being tied to legacy systems, make those banks easier to operate.
I like Netflix. I really do. But there are a few things in their user interface that drive me crazy.
You cannot remove a movie from continue watching. You’ve already watched a movie, don’t want to see the credits, but Netflix thinks you haven’t reached the end.
Tech startup founded by non-tech founders. Founders know little about technology, so they hire a CTO like they would hire an accountant. CTO is not part of management. Technology gets isolated.
There is a new report that associates Let’s Encrypt with phishing. So lots of people in Twitter started screaming because they read phishing and Paypal in the same sentence.
Let’s Encrypt is a foundation that gives certificates away for free.
It’s in the news. Amazon S3, the popular object store crashed yesterday in one of their regions and affected multiple other sites, including Slack and GitHub.
So here are some comments about it:
Imagine you are interviewing some guy for an IT role and she says that he doesn’t get that of “going to the cloud because everybody knows there are no datacenters in the sky”.
Werner’s keynote — https://youtu.be/65unhiJNaok?t=2692
A few months ago, I went to AWS Summit London 2016. One of the takeaways for me was that the cloud is not only the ability to scale up, but also down.
Why One of the issues in a container-based architecture is how painful it is going from code to deployed containers.
Initially you can think it’s only two steps: build an deploy.