In my development of StackRef, I’m interested in tracing down React UI errors as they happen to the user. Sentry.io has been a great tool for this, and their free version gets me what I need, at least for the moment. Recently I had a user test the site out, where they ran into an error that did not show up in Sentry. Why? Because the uBlock Origin plugin is set by default to block that traffic.

Probably you’ve already heard of and have seen examples of ChatGPT, an amazing (especially since it’s essentially in its infancy) web-based AI program that users interact with in plain English (or any modern language) to get AI-generated responses. The questions you ask can be simple and straightforward or even complex and theoretical; they can be anything from writing lyrics to a new (or existing!) song, screenplay scenes for a movie, and in the style of famous persons.

Some news came out yesterday — or, in Google’s eyes, an inaccurate rumor — about Google’s five-year (now three-year) plan to be the Number One cloud provider by 2023, beating out both AWS and Azure. From what was mentioned, execs inside Google at one point discussed the idea of just up and scrapping the whole cloud business altogether! In the end, they decided they’d give it until 2023 to be at the top of the cloud provider list, or … ?

Lots of folks working with AWS EC2 know about utilizing the back-end metadata URL (http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data/) for retrieving instance information. Some of the information you get from this link is pretty innocuous: availability zone, AMI. Some is pretty revealing: IP address and – most damaging in the wrong hands – instance IAM credentials. Yes, if your instance has an IAM Role attached to it, its credentials – although technically temporary/rotating – are retrieved through this metadata URI.

We were running into an issue with our Docker image builds when running them concurrently on the same Jenkins node. In order to pull or push images from/to the repository, Jenkins first needs to authenticate. By default, Docker will store the credentials for the session in the Jenkins user’s $HOME/.docker directory, in the config.json file. But this means any other builds on that node – or potentially any user with access to the Jenkins $HOME – can see and use those credentials themselves.

If you’ve already been running your production environment in the cloud for, say, the past five-plus years or so, you’re probably feeling pretty happy right where you are – or, at least, pretty comfortable. And let’s say you’ve migrated your non-cloud app and its infrastructure over to this cloud provider, as-is: simple VMs, maybe a load balancer. Then, over the years, you’ve matured this environment to take advantage of what this cloud provider has to offer: object storage, caching, auto-scaling, managed databases.

Well, this is embarrassing. I’ve been working with AWS for many years now, but I will likely never claim that I know everything about any particular service and, most especially, every service offering that’s available. The velocity of change there and, really, with any modern cloud provider is dizzying, and keeping up with it can be tough. But, that doesn’t excuse my not fully understanding the basic features of a fundamental piece of infrastructure there.

Passion is an interesting concept. Everyone has a different thing or person or act that defines passion for them. In the end, though, it pretty much means the same thing: it’s what drives you. Personally. Emotionally. Maybe financially, if you’re that sort. It’s what excites you, maybe gives you a sense of purpose, or a goal to work toward. Wakes you up. Gets your attention. But does it define you?