Alex Ellis' Blog

In this post I'll share how and why we (OpenFaaS Ltd) bought 4x DGX Sparks for our team, and what we've learned from it.

We've all heard people say that local Qwen 27B or 35-A3B is "near-Opus level", but I have receipts from a software business and open source projects, and am here to be transparent with you.

I wrote a replacement for GitHub's code review bot.

By popular request, we're releasing Slicer, our much used internal tool from OpenFaaS Ltd for efficiently slicing up bare metal into microVMs.

I have bought dozens of Raspberry Pis over the years, but I'm now turning to the Mini PC for R&D work.

The classic command finger is still found on MacOS and various other BSDs even today, but has fallen out of favour.

In this post I want to introduce a novel way to run virtual machines, namely microVMs on cloud VMs where KVM is not available.

I've had two monitors in the past, either two physical screens plugged into the same computer, or a laptop screen and a monitor.

When we were developing VM images for GitHub Actions for actuated, we often needed to get a shell to explore and debug jobs.

Here's my workflow for setting up the Raspberry Pi 5 to boot from NVMe for headless use.

The time-sharing computers of the 1970s meant operators could submit a job and get the results at some point in the future.

Today the Raspberry Pi Foundation announced the long awaited release of the Raspberry Pi 5.

The use of self-signed certificates or a custom CA is common practice within enterprise companies.

One of the first things we ran into when building self-hosted GitHub Actions runners with Firecracker (actuated.dev) was the rate limits for the Docker Hub.

Coming up with a title that explains the full story here was difficult, so I'm going to try to explain quickly.

You can use actuated's new CLI to calculate the total number of build minutes you're using across an organisation with GitHub Actions.