I'm Tom Usher, a Web Developer & DevOps Engineer based in lovely North Wales, UK.
We are being boiled like frogs. It happened gradually, one algorithmic tweak at a time. What started as a way to connect with friends has become a system that gives the corporations that run social media control over what we consume and the ability to subtly shape how we think.
Frenck (lead engineer of Home Assistant) breaks down the state of his smart home. While you might assume the lead engineer of a home automation platform has everything figured out, it’s fun to hear that’s far from the truth.
…my dashboards are so bad that if I turn on the “Coffee machine” switch, it actually powers on my 3D Printer. 🤦♂️
I keep seeing examples of this - lead developers and experts in their field often don’t have the perfect environment - they are focused on the things they want to do and often the pursuit of the ideal environment falls by the wayside.
This is something I often need to remind myself about when I go on a yak shaving adventure tweaking my editor setup or finding the perfect tool for a job.
I love reading technical deep-dives in to system design and scaling. This post from Jaz (infrastructure at Bluesky) is a great read on how they balanced user needs with performance by finding where they could be ‘imperfect’.
By specifying the limits of reasonable user behavior and embracing imperfection for users who go beyond it, we can continue to provide service that meets the expectations of users without sacrificing scalability of the system.
There’s always sacrifices to be made in system design - I like the idea of defining a ‘reasonable limit’ for any one user and building optimisations around that limit.
If you have more than 1 server and a need to deploy multiple applications 'somewhere' on that cluster without having to micromanage - don't reinvent the wheel, just use Kubernetes. It's the industry standard for a reason, and you're not going to have a hard time finding help when you need it.
However, it's easy to forget that there's a class of service/business where this doesn't make sense. Many small businesses (if they're not using a PaaS like Fly), don't have the resources to run a Kubernetes cluster and 95% of the time, just need an app to run on a single VPS.
Andy Hawthorne writes a lovely summary of why it’s worth blogging:
When you write, you think better. When you think better, you create better.
I’ve just added Simon Willison’s link blog pattern to this site, hoping it will encourage me to write more, even if it’s just fleeting thoughts on a link like this one.
I've been playing with Fly.io a lot recently (see my series on deploying Wagtail to Fly.io).
One of the neat things that has come out of Fly is a renewed interest across the dev world in SQLite - an embedded database that doesn't need any special servers or delicate configuration.
Some part of this interest comes from the thought that if you had an SQLite database that sat right next to your application, in the same VM, with no network latency, that's probably going to be pretty quick and pretty easy to deploy.
To kick everything off, you'll need a Wagtail site configured in a local development environment. The Wagtail Getting Started guide is a great place to start.
Alternatively, grab a checkout of bakerydemo, or find your own existing project.
We'll start by getting your application in to a state where it is easily configurable with environment variables.
I've been playing with Fly.io quite a bit recently.
Yes I'm drawn to the exciting tech, the fascinating blog posts, the attractive pricing and generous free tier (for now...), but more importantly, Fly are one of the few new breed 'PaaS' tools that realise what Heroku got right with its excellent developer experience, and are on a fast-track to replicating and eventually exceeding what Heroku offers.
While Fly is quickly establishing itself as my go-to hosting platform for personal/hobby projects (even before the "sunsetting" of Heroku's free tier), Wagtail has been my go-to platform for almost all the sites I build for quite a while.
Whether you need help with a project, have a question, or just want to say hello, I'm always happy to chat.
Get in touch