https://www.vaines.org/index.xml

I was thinking the other day how much I missed StumbleUpon.

I’ll be speaking in person at DevOps Nottingham on Tuesday, 25th August 2026 at Fothergill House.

The other week I came across the concept of Fuben-Eki, which roughly translates as the “benefit of inconvenience”.

AWS appears to have spent June quietly scattering new FinOps-shaped features around the place.

I’m often asked about AI stuff as the rest of my blog might suggest.

In March 2026, Trivy became the latest reminder that software supply chains are, at best, loosely held together with convention and trust.

In my day-to-day life as a Platform Engineer I find I spend an unusual amount of time thinking about identity.

Back in 2019 when I started at BJSS as a fairly junior Platform Engineer I was first introduced to Terraform around the time when 0.11 and 0.12.

There seems to be a current trend happening corporate and professional communications - looking at you LinkedIn - where people write bullet points and have AI tools expand on it.

Static Site Generators are good, but what if they were more gooder?

Déjà Vu in the IDE Every few years the industry seems to come back to the same idea with a fresh lick of paint.

The creators of the Immich photo hosting app have a page for Cursed Knowledge and the concept really resonated with me.

I was trying to visualise some S3 buckets for a cost optimisation exercise and wanted to be able to run a Tree command on it, obviously thats not a thing the Unix command can do … and I’ve been playing with JavaScript recently.

I read this piece from the BBC and Sabine Zetteler’s words — “Why would I bother to read something someone couldn’t be bothered to write” — really resonated with me.

I’ve been trying to think of a small game idea I could build as a way of playing with React and came up with a small game about guessing synonyms.

A talk so good, I’m doing it again!

I accidentally picked up a new hobby after my partner gifted my dad and I a wood turning course/experience thing for Christmas 2023.

I spoke at and helped design a workshop for this years Leeds Digital Festival; everyone seems to be talking about AI but very little actual hands on opportunities are available for engineers to get down and dirty with the services.

I’ll be talking at the upcoming Nottingham’s TechFast on the 15th of May 2024 on an entirely unexpected topic of Serverless, Lambdas & Terraform (unless you’ve heard me talk before, in which case it’s quite expected).

There are many ways to manage cloud infrastructure and code we cram on it.

I’ll be talking at this year’s Leeds Digital Festival; We’ve taught Microsoft’s AI and ML services to play the ITV classic, Catchphrase.

My colleague Dan Yip and I will be talking at the Leeds AWS User Group on ‘Why you are doing Lambda functions wrong’

Seemingly everyone must now have a blog post about using ChatGPT, lets get on that band waggon.

This little project stemmed from me seeing what looked like a fun idea but being a tight-arsed Yorkshireman.

For a long time now most container based workloads and projects I have worked with have needed EC2 Bastion hosts for various reasons; as Fargate in particular has expanded features and general functionality those needs for an EC2 bastion hosts have been in

When I’ve been involved in an incident or dragged in to one of those “if we get enough people involved one of them might know” calls, one of the first things that usually catches my attention is the lack of solid troubleshooting that’s gone on.

I know the AWS CLI is different to the AWS CDK used by the provider and the two are not the same.

The Problem I love working through the Advent of Code puzzles, this year I decided it was a good opportunity to learn some JavaScript.

The Challenge I’ve have been looking at some cost and performance improvements in some of my infrastructure.

I have been trying to teach myself how to build a simple Node.JS API with a NoSQL backend.

One of the first tools I picked up walking in to the DevOps world was Terraform, I found it a bit challenging to get to grips with one major concept.

Attempts to minimise the number of credentials required is becoming more and more common, particularly with the adoption of social logins.

An SCCM Environment I was looking at had a few hundred application packages.

One of the most common things I use Powershell for is Office 356, this requires the modules be installed and connecting to one of the Office365 sessions, Skype, Exchange or the Security & Compliance center.

One of the most common things I use Powershell for requires the ActiveDirectory module.

When you need to test Active Directory in a lab with sample users, creating sufficiently realistic test accounts is a time consuming and tedious process.

Writing code that can be maintained by multiple people always requires some sort of structure.

Sometime it’s necessary to email an individual about multiple people.