Sep 26, 2022Cache All the ThingsA PKM workflow to incrementally retain (and find) everything Infinite knowledge. Digital Art. Context An engineering manager that will remain unnamed told me his story of trying to find the solution to a technical problem on the internet. …Pkm8 min readPkm8 min read
Oct 25, 2020A Hierarchical Tool for ThoughtIn the summer of 2020, I launched Dendron — a note-taking tool that helps you manage information using flexible hierarchies. You can refer to my earlier pieces to read about why hierarchies matter. A question I’m often asked is what makes Dendron different from all the other tools which also…Notes5 min readNotes5 min read
Sep 18, 2020Dendron — an open source, local first, anti-roam note-taking toolDendron is meant to be the fastest way for people to create, reference, and collaborate on knowledge. It is based on a hierarchical first approach to note taking. Hierarchy first means that Dendron helps you effortlessly create, manage, and reference your notes through flexible hierarchies. I call it anti-roam because…Pkm1 min readPkm1 min read
Aug 24, 2020A Hierarchy First Approach to Note TakingTen years ago I wrote a note. That led to another, and then another, and soon enough, I had a few thousand of them and an increasingly unhappy dropbox client that refused to sync it all. The reason for all these notes is because of technology. I worked at AWS…Pkm9 min readPkm9 min read
Jan 6, 2020Everything I Learned from One Year of AWS ConsultingThey say that hindsight is 2020 — which makes the start of this year the perfect time to reflect on the last. 2019 was a tumultuous year — both from a macro world socio-economic oh-my-god-what-is-happening standpoint and from a micro individual oh-my-god-what-am-I-doing standpoint. On the individual front, I made three…AWS17 min readAWS17 min read
Aug 8, 2019The Open CDK GuideOver the past year, I’ve been following the development of the AWS CloudDevelopment Kit (CDK) — a framework built on top of CloudFormation that makes it delightful for users to manage AWS Infrastructure as Code (IaC). This has been my favorite release of AWS in 2019 in a year of…AWS1 min readAWS1 min read
Mar 11, 2019No Reservations: A Definite Guide to EC2 Reserved InstancesEC2 Reserved Instances (RIs) provide steep discounts (up to 75%) to the hourly cost of running an EC2 instance in exchange for an upfront commitment to using a particular instance configuration for either a 1 year or 3 year term. In addition to the billing discount, certain RIs also offer…AWS13 min readAWS13 min read
Feb 1, 2019Benchmarking Lambda’s Idle Timeout Before A Cold StartIn the not so distant past, businesses that wanted to build internet services needed to provision their own hardware. That meant buying a rack and a bunch of servers and stashing them in a cool part of the building and hope that no one would trip over the wires. As…AWS7 min readAWS7 min read
Jan 17, 2019Giving Third Parties Limited Access to your AWS Account4 minute read Whenever I’m working with a new client, one of the first things we talk about is access. Most clients have the majority of their business running on top of AWS and don’t feel comfortable (nor would I recommend) that they give a consultant complete access on day…AWS5 min readAWS5 min read
Nov 25, 2018Creating a Transcription Service in 12hFor Thanksgiving weekend, I decided that instead of get new things, I would take a look at my bucket list and try to take things out instead. One thing in particular that’s been on my mind is making audio transcriptions. I run a podcast and recently I’ve been experimenting with…AWS3 min readAWS3 min read
