Senior Cloud & Performance Advisor for Growing Tech Companies
Since it has an interesting overlap in the Venn diagram of “AI” and “data sovereignty”, here’s a brief follow up to my “Kubernetes, I Guess” article… Cloud Act The Cloud Act allows “federal law enforcement to compel U.S.-based technology companies via warrant or subpoena to provide requested data stored on servers regardless of whether the […]
I’m currently working on the KCNA Kubernetes Certification. This might come as a surprise to anyone who knows me, given that I’ve – hopefully subtly – eye-rolled when clients say they’re using Kubernetes (aka “k8s”). Most of the time, I really don’t think your company needs Kubernetes. Yes, Netflix use Kubernetes!Yes, Uber use Kubernetes! No, […]
I’ve been looking for a new contract for a little while now, and thought I’d try to improve my chances by responding to some feedback which suggests, based on my CV, it’s not that clear what I can do and why you’d hire me. I wrote a “little” thing, then asked Bing’s ChatGPT bot to […]
While working at Burberry I had a few opportunities to work directly with some of the lovely people at Google, focussing on site speed, resilience, and improving the user experience. Working with Google representatives, we organised a series of fascinating hackathon events relating to improving perceived performance, and not losing an offline user. Perception of […]
AKA “Is your Company a Software House or is it a Retailer?” These days you can easily set up an online shop in a matter of minutes/hours, buying no hardware, setting up no software; just signing up to something like Shopify (or WooCommerce if you’re using WordPress) for a few coins a month and you […]
In case you didn’t already believe it, your Web Browser has super powers. No longer is it something to merely display a document marked up with hypertext. No longer is it limited to the read-only text and images of the olden days (aka the last two decades or so). Oh no. Now that the browser […]
In my previous articles I took you through the process of setting up your own private WebPageTest, either via the AWS interface, or via Terraform infrastructure as code). By default, this would create a Private WebPageTest instance that uses the latest code on the release branch of the official WPOFoundation github repo for WebPageTest. This […]
This article assumes you have an understanding of what Terraform is, what WebPageTest is and some AWS basics. Have you ever wanted to have your WebPageTest setup managed as infrastructure as code, so you can keep all those carefully tuned changes and custom settings in source control, ready to confidently and repeatedly destroy and rebuild at […]
This article assumes that you know the basics of AWS, WebPageTest, SSH, and at least one linux text editor. When talking to people about website performance stats, I’ll usually split it into Real User Metrics (RUM) and Automated (Synthetic/Test Lab): RUM is performance data reported from the website you own, reported into the analytics tool […]
The fantastic WebPageTest, free to use and public, has been available to set up your own private instances for many years; I wrote this up a while back, and scripted a Terraform version to make this as easy and automated as possible. For AWS it was just a case of creating an EC2 instance (other […]