Choosing Terraform vs. Ansible

12 Nov 2025 🔖 devops 💬 EN

In my Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tool types article, I listed Terraform as a “resource provisioning (day 0)” tool example, and Ansible as a “configuration management (day 1)” tool example.

I don’t hate it … but it hasn’t stopped people from asking me to clarify the difference when…

Honestly, yeah, there’s a lot of overlap.

Azure Blob Storage SAS reasoning via PowerShell Pester

12 Nov 2025 🔖 azure powershell integration intermediate security tips web development 💬 EN

It turns out that once you’ve got PowerShell’s “Pester” module up and running on your computer, you don’t actually need to call Invoke-Pester to run code that includes syntax like Describe and It and | Should -Be. You can just run a normal .ps1 file and those commands simply … work … as if you’d run Invoke-Pester.

Censoring secrets from logs in infrastructure as code

15 Oct 2025 🔖 devops security 💬 EN

This is not exhaustive, but here’re a few coding hygiene tidbits for making sure that when you need to use a secret in your infrastructure as code (IaC), it doesn’t leak into its execution runtime’s system logs.

Test-driven development for infrastructure as code

15 Oct 2025 🔖 devops 💬 EN

Much as I’m hooked on it, I’ll admit test-driven development (TDD) has a reputation for being a bit intimidating to adopt in traditional software application development.

Luckily, it’s not just easier, but arguably almost tailor-made for the work of sysadmins taking on the challenge of infrastructure as code (IaC).

Infrastructure as code tool types

06 Oct 2025 🔖 devops 💬 EN

Lately, I’ve been studying industry-standard taxonomies for categorizing the many types of tool that a company needs if its wants to modernize delivering and managing servers using “infrastructure as code.”

So far, I’m at 15 categories.

Note: my examples are probably pretty inaccurate. I’m not a sysadmin, I’ve just been researching with GenAI and picking sysadmins’ brains, and potentially not very effectively. Please take this post with a grain of salt.

Notes from Designing Content Authoring Experiences

03 Oct 2025 🔖 web development 💬 EN

I work in tech. That means that for friends and family, I sometimes find myself fixing printers and making business web sites. Greg Dunlap’s new book “Designing Content Authoring Experiences” is a resource I wish I’d had available to me over the last two decades.

Look, ma, I'm a language teacher!

08 Aug 2025 🔖 professional development prompt engineering 💬 EN

I shared yesterday’s LLM prompts for requirements analysis and project scoping post with a friend, and they said:

“You got to teach languages this week!”

I teared up, and nearly dropped what I was holding, when I read that comment.

LLM-assisted requirements analysis and scoping

07 Aug 2025 🔖 devops prompt engineering 💬 EN

• Q: How do you eat an elephant?
• A: One bite at a time.
• Q: How do you pick the first bite?
• A: Like this (keep reading).

E2E and Synthetic Testing Considered Harmful

01 Aug 2025 🔖 web development devops security 💬 EN

“End-to-end test automation and synthetic monitoring considered harmful” – was I clickbaitey enough to get your attention? 😉

Frontend automated testing demystifier

07 Jul 2025 🔖 web development 💬 EN

When it comes to authoring automated test code for web application frontends, it’s easy to get confused about what kinds of test go where in the “testing pyramid” and how to implement them – especially since all four levels of the “testing pyramid” potentially ask the question: “does this HTML/DOM element exist in this condition?”.