Two bundles for you today:

- Python courses
- Cloud Practice Exams (mostly AI-related, tho)

#bundle

An article from Alex Ewerlöf on how the Staff Engineer Archetypes can backfire.

Honestly, it’s not the best of his articles, but it’s a good illustration that you cannot “lock yourself” just on a single aspect of your work. Especially, once you’ve gotten high enough to levels such as a Staff Engineer.

#culture #career

A story from OpenAI on how they scale Postgres.

While this is an interesting read, and you can definitely borrow some ideas from there; I got an impression that OpenAI is moving towards Azure’s CosmosDB from Postgres.

If a new feature requires additional tables, they must be in alternative sharded systems such as Azure CosmosDB rather than PostgreSQL.

—-

While we’re happy with how far PostgreSQL has taken us, we continue to push its limits to ensure we have sufficient runway for future growth. We’ve already migrated the shardable write-heavy workloads to our sharded systems like CosmosDB. The remaining write-heavy workloads are more challenging to shard—we’re actively migrating those as well to further offload writes from the PostgreSQL primary.

Cosmos DB, from my understanding, is a document-oriented DB from Microsoft, similar to MongoDB.

#databases

You know that I keep the most juicy articles for Friday, right?

AI Isn't Replacing SREs. It's Deskilling Them.

Here's the article. I leave you with that.


#sre #culture

These days all the talks are about AI.

My (hypothetical) SRECon26 keynote is an article from Charity Majors with her advice on how SREs should approach AI.

BTW, I’ve heard good things about SRECon. I don’t know if the upcoming SRECon Americas is the same as SRECon in Dublin in October, but maybe I should check that one out!

#sre #ai

4 ways to use Argo CD and Terraform together is an article on how to pass data between Terraform (or OpenTofu) and ArgoCD (or any other GitOps tool for that matter). For example, if you're creating a new infrastructure component and need to pass its endpoints to an app.


They pointed out quite explicitly, that you shouldn't just pass raw secrets around. However, they didn't mention any secret storage for whatever reason. For example, you can use vault_generic_secret resource to store credentials in Vault and then something like the External Secrets Operator to fetch them from there. I am not saying, you should, but you can.

P.S. This article was shared in our chat. Come join us! The chat is in Ukrainian, and it's usually fun!

#terraform #argocd #cd #kubernetes

So, Amazon pushed back on the Financial Times report about AI causing outages. This is not news.

However, they now require a senior engineer's approval on the AI generated code pushed by non-senior engineers, apparently. It's not clear, who should review AI code generated by seniors, though.

- Financial Times (paywalled).
- Opinion on Xitter.
- Discussion on Hacker News.

This is an interesting twist on the whole AI adoption, and it would be very interesting to see where it would go from here. At least, at Amazon.

P.S. As a bonus, here's a book bundle about LLMs and some related stuff, so you could review AI-generated code more efficiently!

#ai #aws #culture

A colleague of mine wrote an article on using Cloudflare Tunnels to securely connect to your self-hosted things. It specifically covers quirks of connecting mobile apps, since not all of them can handle auth redirects correctly.

This is a nice read if you have a home lab or anything self-hosted. However, you can also use Cloudflare Tunnels for your business cases, like exposing your staging backend to test mobile devices, etc.

#security #cloudflare

​​For today’s Donations Monday, I’d like to remind you about the UA Responders foundation that raises money for the rehabilitation of Ukrainian veterans.

#donations #Ukraine

I guess many of you are familiar with the concept of OKRs - Objective-Key-Results. OKRs have been around for quite some time. So, of course, there is a book about it.

Here is a short summary of this book by someone on the internet, alongside with their rating and recommendation for whom this book may be interesting.

Now, you can easily generate a book summary using AI these days. The summary itself is not the reason I want to share it with you. I think, writing such summaries is a great way of conceptualizing books for yourself in the first place. I keep telling myself, I should do this as well. Unfortunately, I am lazy :\

#books #okr #management

A former colleague of mine wrote an article on how to write better tests with AI.

I recall, there were debates, what should a human write: tests or the implementation. Now, there are debates on whether a human should open their IDE at all.

This article is front-end focused, but it has some actionable and more or less universal advice on how to make AI do tests better. At the end of the day, AI is just another tool and the whole trick is in how good do you apply it.

#ai #programming