Blog on Aaron's Blog

VS Code Language Servers in Neovim

Fri, 24 Apr 2026 22:47:00 +1000

I've been wanting to do my ESPHome development in Neovim, but the autocompletion and diagnostic capabilities in the dashboard make it hard to leave it. I noticed that it was powered by a VS Code extension. Can I get this running in Neovim?

Fixing my Dyson TP07

Tue, 24 Mar 2026 11:22:00 +1100

Recently fixed an issue with my "Dyson Purifier CoolTM Fan" (TP07) and wanted to share for anyone else that was having the same issue.

TL;DR: the cable to the screen was invisibly broken, and this causes the entire fan to not boot.

ESP32-based Smart Switch for PC without WOL

Wed, 04 Mar 2026 13:20:26 +1100

Making a smart power switch for my PC that doesn't support Wake-on-LAN.

How Not to Do Healthchecks

Wed, 04 Mar 2026 13:15:35 +1100

Just because I see it all too often, so here's some examples.

Fixing GoPro videos with ADB, Termux and FFMPEG

Tue, 19 Sep 2023 13:30:28 +1000

A summary of my adventures in the GoPro Quik app, mp4 metadata, root on Android, ADB, static linking and ffmpeg in Termux.

Fixing Security for Terraform Plan

Thu, 03 Aug 2023 16:18:23 +1000

So you want to lock down your Terraform state?

`npm update`, but actually useful

Thu, 27 Apr 2023 12:01:47 +1000

Intuitively, to update a package using npm, you might assume you need to run something like:

npm update

This command does nothing. The correct command is:

npm install <package name>@latest

Why We Chose Fluentd Over Fluent Bit

Tue, 12 Oct 2021 09:40:25 +1100

Fluent Bit is a log shipping agent, designed to be lightweight and run in distributed environments. So why did we pick Fluentd, which is written in Ruby and predates Fluent Bit?

SRAM eTAP AXS Front Derailleur Adjustment

Sun, 10 Oct 2021 12:28:13 +1100

SRAM don't make it particularly easy to find a quick reference on eTAP AXS front derailleur adjustment without having to sit through a Youtube video.

TL;DW: turn the top screw on the front derailleur clockwise to stop your chain from falling off when shifting up.

VPC Endpoints Without the Magic

Wed, 19 May 2021 11:31:15 +1000

A short summary of the two types of VPC Endpoints and how they work.

VPN to any EC2 Instance using SSH

Mon, 19 Apr 2021 10:25:25 +1000

A horrible hack that allows you to create a VPN tunnel from your workstation to any of your EC2 instances -- even one you don't have direct network access to, such as an instance in a private subnet.

A CMS Project

Wed, 21 Oct 2020 11:43:57 +1100

This blog entry is the story of my experience in implemeting a CMS as a consultant. It details some mundane problems I faced in day-to-day work and the solutions that my team and I implemented, probably in more detail than necessary. I make no attempt to avoid the boring and tedious parts of the project. Maybe you can learn something from it, or maybe you can relate to it.

Why You Need PSPs in EKS

Fri, 04 Oct 2019 11:47:24 +1000

Pod Security Policies (PSPs) are an important component of security in Kubernetes. Lets explore what happens without them.

GitLab Monorepo Pipelines

Wed, 18 Sep 2019 10:45:00 +1000

Exploring GitLab's new Directed Acyclic Graph feature to build monorepo CI/CD pipelines.

Git Revert Last n Commits

Thu, 11 Jul 2019 10:24:07 +1000

To revert the last n commits using git:

git revert HEAD~3..HEAD

Smoke Testing Infrastructure

Fri, 24 May 2019 11:23:20 +1000

Some real-world examples on how to smoke test infrastructure.

AWS Summit 2019

Sat, 04 May 2019 12:43:44 +1000

A few thoughts and photos on the Sydney AWS Summit 2019.

gVisor on ECS

Tue, 19 Mar 2019 12:21:36 +1100

Google's gVisor exists to provide a true sandbox for your Docker containers. It replaces runc, the default Docker runtime which recently had a serious vulnerability ¹.

In theory gVisor is a drop-in replacement for runc, but does it actually work with Amazon ECS?

Dark mode on all the things

Mon, 24 Dec 2018 13:21:37 +1100

Arc Dark

sudo dnf install arc-theme gnome-tweaks

nvim

  {
    "catppuccin/nvim", -- https://github.com/catppuccin/nvim
    name = "catppuccin",
    lazy = false,
    priority = 1000,
    opts = {
      dim_inactive = {
        enabled = true,    -- dims the background color of inactive window
        -- shade = "dark",
        percentage = 0.99, -- 50, -- 0.15, -- percentage of the shade to apply to the inactive window
      },
      integrations = {
        notify = true,
        notifier = true,
        lsp_trouble = true,
        barbar = true,
        neotree = true,
        noice = true,
        dropbar = { enabled = true },
        mason = true,
        nvim_surround = true,
        overseer = true,
        which_key = true,
        snacks = {
          enabled = true,
          -- indent_scope_color = "", -- catppuccin color (eg. `lavender`) Default: text
        },
        native_lsp = {
          enabled = true,
          virtual_text = {
            errors = { "italic" },
            hints = { "italic" },
            warnings = { "italic" },
            information = { "italic" },
            ok = { "italic" },
          },
          underlines = {
            errors = { "underline" },
            hints = { "underline" },
            warnings = { "underline" },
            information = { "underline" },
            ok = { "underline" },
          },
          inlay_hints = {
            background = true,
          },
        },
    },
    config = function(_, opts)
      require("catppuccin").setup(opts)
      vim.cmd.colorscheme("catppuccin-macchiato")
    end
  },

Everything Else - Dark Reader

https://darkreader.org/

Antipatterns

Fri, 21 Dec 2018 21:33:00 +1100

Just a list of antipatterns I'm not going to elaborate on in no particular order

Boiling the ocean
Big bang deliveries
Developer portals
Abstracting the cloud from your engineers
Multi-cloud
Implementing tooling beyond your maturity
Ignoring boring, simple fixes in favour of shiny tech
Run the company on your laptop
Concurrent microservice development without contract testing
Access control that isn't role-based
Depriving staff of agency
Security teams
Conflating one-way doors with two-way doors (decisions)
Using features simply because they exist
Architects
Gitops
Git branch strategies that aren't trunk-based
Write code that is easy to delete, not easy to extend
Liveness checks that rely on downstream systems
Thinking load balancers and DNS aren't good enough
Telling yourself you'll make that pipeline stage automatic later on
Monorepos
Troubleshooting through the pipeline
A lack of care for how clear naming of things is necessary for basic communication
Not forcing people to use open communication channels

Google SRE Book Takeaways

Fri, 21 Dec 2018 19:18:05 +1100

SRE is what happens when you ask a software engineer to design an operations team.

I just finished reading through the (first) Google SRE book. While a lot of it is what we take for granted today, there were a few worthwhile takeaways for me.

ECS Autoscaling Tips

Fri, 20 Jul 2018 10:26:49 +1000

Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) is a highly scalable, high-performance container orchestration service that supports Docker containers and allows you to easily run and scale containerized applications on AWS.

Autoscaling your container orchestration system introduces some complexity. Here are some tips for creating robust autoscaling for your ECS Cluster.

Mass CloudFormation Template Validation

Wed, 18 Jul 2018 23:39:31 +1000

Ever needed to do CI on a centralised CloudFormation repository, and struggled to get template validation done quickly? Here's how you can do it.

AWS ALB Limitations

Sat, 14 Jul 2018 11:20:07 +1000

Some gripes on AWS Application Load balancers.

Serverless Plugins

Thu, 12 Jul 2018 23:37:04 +1000

Here are some cool plugins for Serverless:

serverless-log-forwarding

> I want a log solution that is both durable and has powerful search capabilities

CloudWatch Logs is reliable, but that's about it. You need something that you can search and analyse logs with, and this plugin is the bridge between Lambda and your log aggregation system.

serverless-plugin-aws-alerts

Building a full suite of alerts for a Serverless application is not simple, but this gives you a big head start. It alerts on the 4 main metrics (one being errors) that are already provided by CloudWatch Metrics. Just install and configure a destination SNS topic that sends to your alert aggregation system.

Portable Virtualenv

Thu, 12 Jul 2018 23:01:43 +1000

Ever wanted to move a Python virtualenv around but found it didn't work? Here's how you can create a portable virtualenv for Python 3.6.

My First Post

Thu, 12 Jul 2018 22:53:59 +1000

Hello world!