I have experience in backend and cloud engineering. I'm currently working with OpenTofu (AWS), Kubernetes and Python as a platform engineer.
I will no longer be posing new articles here. My new blog can be found at https://simoncrowe.blog. How did I do it? My main objectives were to run my self-hosted blog in a way that was both simple and cheap. I’m a fan of the fedeverse model of social...
In truth, this isn’t a minimal viable product; it’s a minimum viable backend. I’ve been a platform engineer for too long to start throwing together UIs, even in my spare time. If you're interested in a full-fledged product, at least one startup is do...
This is another short post about my pet project, Shortlist. The project's main aims were to help me pass my CKAD exam (which I luckily did) and give me some exposure to operating LLMs in the cloud. I wanted to do this with as small an impact on my ba...
While working on my pet project Shortlist, I needed to send emails. While I could have used a transactional email service like Mandrill, I wanted something cloud-based that could be configured with infrastructure-as-code. I couldn’t find any email se...
In part one of this post, I talked about my tribulations trying to solve 2024’s Advent of Code using Elixer. I ended with my solution to part 1 of day 6, which was too inefficient to re-use for part 2. This article details how I re-wrote my day 6 sol...
I tried 2024’s Advent of Code using the functional language Elixir. I didn’t get as far as I did in the previous two years. This was partly due to being busy with work and getting ill, but some resulted from being forced to think of most of my soluti...
Truly, this should be called An Incomplete Taxonomy of HTTP APIs, but I went with the briefer title. It covers the patterns I’ve come across over seven years working as a software engineer. I will no doubt encounter more in the coming years, and migh...
The first article in this series dealt with avoiding excessive use of mocks when testing code that performs I/O. This article deals with service functions that make use of dependency inversion. Mocks should be absent from these tests altogether. This...
Mocks are a necessary evil in Python testing. If overused, they essentially become "change detectors", meaning that every time you refactor the implementation of your code, you must update the mocks too. Ideally, your tests should verify what your co...
