Recent content on John Misczak
In May of 2013, as Microsoft prepared to launch its new XBox console, they announced plans to tie all copies of an XBox game, both physical and digital, to a license that had to be authorized and deauthorized from your console via an online check that had to occur once a day . The outcry from the gaming community at the time was so loud and visceral that Microsoft quickly backpedaled on these…
Way back in 2016, I initially tried out an ultrawide monitor in hopes of simplifying my desk setup. Instead of running two different monitors connected to a desktop and my work laptop, I thought a single 34” ultrawide one would clean up a lot of cables. I bought a Dell U3415W because it was one of the few monitors at the time that had a built-in KVM for switching between my two computers. And for…
Exactly one week ago , Tim Cook broke the news that Apple would be raising the prices of its products due to the rising costs of memory and storage brought on by the AI industry’s insatiable data center demand and growth. Many in the industry thought that these prices would arrive when new iterations of each product shipped - for example, with the new iPhone during its annual September launch. We…
Way back in November of 2025 , Valve made several hardware announcements that seemed to build on its previous releases. A new Steam Controller which took a lot of notes from the popular but still niche Steam Deck; a new VR headset called the Steam Frame that could connect to your PC wirelessly; and their second attempt at cracking the home theater PC/console market called the Steam Machine.
In my post last month about rethinking my personal tech stack , I had mentioned that I had been using Ente Photos as an alternative to Google Photos, but had also been evaluating Immich. I also mentioned that one day in the future I might move over to Immich after figuring out a better backup strategy for my HomeLab.
Several years ago, I bought a Synology DS920+ to use as a network attached storage (NAS) appliance in the house. I don’t work as a photographer or video editor so my work doesn’t really have any massive storage needs; rather, I wanted someplace to host media for the family that didn’t require an ongoing subscription service to access. For a few years, it served that purpose almost exclusively,…
Like many people, I usually take the start of a new year as an opportunity to reevaluate some choices and habits I have and see if there is room for improvement. One such area up for review is the set of services, apps, and subscriptions I use outside of work.
Recently, Ruby Central, the non-profit responsible for maintaining the RubyGems package manager, suffered a security incident where they temporarily lost control of their AWS account. They have since published a post-mortem of this event that is ostensibly aimed at putting their community’s minds at ease. Unfortunately, it had the opposite effect on me, causing me to come away with more questions…
While AWS re:Invent doesn’t officially kick off until December 2, we are now officially in the lead up to the event, a time that often seea a flurry of new feature and service announcements. While these announcements are often overshadowed by new products that debut at the conference, they are often just as important (if not more so) to the work I do every day. This week has been the strongest…
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 EC2 instances in AWS can have access to something called the instance metadata service, which makes information (namely metadata ) about an instance available to applications, services, code, etc. that runs on the instance. For example, a piece of code can query the metadata service to learn what region it is currently running in.
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 Earlier this year, my team was provided access to a training budget for Google Cloud Platform that we could use in various ways to purchase classroom trainings or licenses to Google’s on-demand training platform, Cloud Skills Boost as well as a number of exam vouchers that could be used on various GCP certification exams. While I had…
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 One of AWS’ best practices for building and managing infrastructure in the cloud is to use consistent, accurate tags for the purposes of cost management, correct owner attribution (during operations and security incidents), and even attribute-based access control. This type of tag compliance can be easier said than done, however,…
Recently, I had to complete a project that involved running the open source tool Cloudquery to create an inventory of resources in a GCP organization. This assignment turned out to be a great introduction to learning how Google Cloud Platform works, as I had almost exclusively used AWS previously (with only minor trials in both Azure and GCP during that time). Throughout the project, I found…
The annual AWS re:Invent conference has come and gone. As usual, there is an overwhelming amount of new product launches, feature enhancements, and other service offering announcements to parse through. You could spend several days just sifting through all of the information on ‘new stuff’. What I was interested this time, however, was some of the announcements for security-related services and…
This is a lightning talk I gave at MongoDB World 2022 . 
 As your application continues to grow and scale, you may choose to take advantage of powerful MongoDB Atlas features, such as multi-region clusters and sharding, in order to provide a good user experience. While these features are useful, they can also introduce complexities to your application’s architecture if configured incorrectly.…
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 Several years back, I received a Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ kit from CanaKit alongside this book . I spent some time doing the basic stuff with it (blinking LEDs, running a Linux server, etc.) but eventually turning it into a RetroPie and installing lots of retro games on it. After a while, I lost interest in tinkering with it and just let…
Most developers by now are familiar with MongoDB, a NoSQL database that stores data as documents instead of rows. MongoDB’s fully managed service product, MongoDB Atlas, comes with MongoDB Realm, which is a set of services that help facilitate mobile and web development by providing a scalable, serverless backend for your application. Realm offers a lot of services (more than we can cover in just…
I’m John Misczak and this is my blog where I (infrequently) write about some stuff I’m working on or topics I’m currently learning about. 
 I currently work in cloud security, helping secure applications and services across AWS, Azure, and GCP. Outside of work, I spend most of my time with my kids - but when they’re otherwise busy or asleep, I can usually be found out running or tinkering with…
2026 
 
 
 
 Jul 01 
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 Sony's Footgun 
 
 
 
 Jun 28 
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 Return of the Ultrawide 
 
 
 
 Jun 25 
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 The Consumer Tech Apocalypse 
 
 
 
 Jun 22 
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 The Steam Machine 
 
 
 
 Jan 22 
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 Building Out The HomeLab: Photos with Immich 
 
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