Chris Rants at Clouds

I need to properly make a new blog post as it’s been a while, but I got sidetracked with questions about space, speed, g-forces, and fixed points.

It’s been three months since my last blog post and, honestly, it’s been one of the busiest quarters I can remember.

Chris Funderburg (bocan) Chris Funderburg, often under the alias bocan, is a GenX Texan living in the UK, who went from loading bombs on F-16s to loading Terraform on clouds. 30 years building platforms.

The simple definition A Platform Engineer builds and runs the internal platform that software, data, and ML teams use to ship reliably: from code → to production, from data → to insights, from models → to production endpoints - while staying secure and ob…

Hello and welcome to 2026!

Building Isolated Developer Environments with GitHub Actions Branch Conventions TL;DR: By combining GitHub Actions branch patterns with Terraform workspaces, I’ve created a system where developers get their own isolated AWS environment simply by pushing to

So, as I mentioned in my last post, I started a new consulting gig recently at Mesh-AI.

This is How it’s All Gone Down 🗓️ There My “last day” at MAK System was the Friday, the 26th of September.

My Last Week at Mak Systems This was my last week at Mak System Software Solutions.

It’s Mostly Work Drama This Week Well, on Monday it occurred to me that I had 2 weeks left in this contract.

Weather Rained every day this week!

Sometimes, you find yourself unable to sleep late at night, and you get an idea in your head that you just have to get out.

Some people - almost EVERYONE on Bluesky - like to get their knickers in a twist about AI.

Feeling we needed a break after the holiday in Texas, we decided to take a long weekend in Cornwall.

I don’t even know where to start with this one.

## What’s been going on?

Current Active Projects My Allotment Garden This year’s been difficult with the lack of rain, but I’ve managed to grow: - Beets (the usual red, golden, and rainbow) - Carrots (specifically Ball carrots) - Courgettes (Squash) - Garlic - Greengage Plums - L…

Our youngest daughter wanted to got to Cardiff this weekend to visit a particular market so we rolled out of bed by 9am and set off around 10.

Arch Linux ARM on M1 Parallels: Encrypted Root Done Right (A Battle Log & Guide) So, you’ve decided to tackle Arch Linux ARM on your shiny Apple Mx Mac via Parallels Desktop.

The last 24 hours has been a day of wins.

Hello everyone, not much to report this month, but otherwise I felt like I’d been too quiet, so here we are.

To Hospital Again and Back I pre-wrote this post last week, intending to share that I was feeling somewhat better than the week before.

It’s been a while since my last post.

Weekly Notes At work, I deployed my client’s first Aurora PostgreSQL RDS instance for one of their new customers.

This is a little Github Action’s workflow that, upon a push into your main branch, will create a new version tag, and then create a release with release notes.

Macedonian Work Trip So, myself and the two other British contractors spend a week in Skopje, North Macedonia with our Polish and Macedonian counterparts, and it ended up being both super productive and a lot of hard work.

So, apparently, the x-ray of my hip indicates arthritis that’s “moderate”.

In no particular order: Work Next Sunday, I’m off to North Macedonia for a week to plan out future work with my current client.

Post Christmas, technically still on boxing day, I was a bit bored late at night and looking through videos on Amazon Prime.

I’ve been a bit slack with updates lately due to being too busy.

This post is a work in progress.

I’ve spent the last 3 or 4 weekends playing with technology.

My current pgp/gpg public key is available to download here.

It Makes Me Sad This poor person on Github is about to learn an unhappy fact.

A Coincidence I’d been needing to get the car cleaned as it was a mess - particularly inside.

Sick Even from early vacation in Scotland, I was starting to get sick with a cold.

Enjoying Work In any job or role, white or blue collar, skilled or unskilled, you always have a period of feeling like an impostor at the beginning.

Gym Guilt I cancelled my gym membership yesterday and I feel terribly guilty about it!

Pixel 3 Watch My new Google Pixel 3 Watch pitched up this morning.

I’m of course 51 year old and prime GenX - so I don’t tend to be “stoked” much anymore.

This week, just for grins, I’m experimenting with some specific headlines as used by Tracy Durnell in her excellent blog that I’ve now added to my Blogroll.

This came from a camp I attended probably a decade ago.

You can tell when I’ve had a rough week as I backslide into a weekly update.

DIY For a while now, we’ve been replacing the internal doors in our home - from the cheap pine ones we put in when we first moved here some 29ish years ago - to solid oak ones.

Spent a long Weekend in New York City On Wednesday evening after work, the missus, myself, and our youngest daughter packed up and drove to our usual over-nighter hotel near Heathrow.

Hello World!

What’s a Now Page?

I don’t normally do week notes, but I felt the urge today.

Today I Learned: Google Workspace SAML certificates expire after 5 years.

I’ve been a Linux admin since the late 90s, and for many many years I’ve heard the command “tmux” mentioned.