Blog

I write this blog to help me better express myself, and to practice thinking in public.

Here are some notable posts:

Meet `cici`, a multi-tool for building GitLab CI/CD pipelines

Writing the same GitLab CI/CD pipeline over and over isn't much fun, but making reusable pipelines at scale is hard. Here's a set of tools I've been developing to make things easier.

Brett Weir, Jul 3, 2023, 8 mins

Customize a Raspberry Pi image without any hardware

Preparing SD card images is toilsome and fraught with difficulty, but there's a better way! In this article, I'll show you a method for configuring a Raspberry Pi that doesn't require hardware at all. What!

Brett Weir, Jun 26, 2023, 14 mins

Hosting static sites with Cloudflare R2 and MinIO Client

Static site hosting services are a dime a dozen, but situations sometimes come up where you need something more flexible. In this article, we'll learn how to host a static site using only Cloudflare R2 and MinIO Client.

Brett Weir, Jun 19, 2023, 9 mins

Deploy a Kubernetes cluster on DigitalOcean with Terraform and GitLab

In this article, we'll deploy matching staging and production Kubernetes environments in DigitalOcean using a single GitLab-managed Terraform project, so that cluster administration is safe, reliable and not really something to worry about.

Brett Weir, Jun 12, 2023, 12 mins

The Bootstrapping Problem

There is a chicken-and-egg dilemma endemic to infrastructure development, where infrastructure that exists today could not be created from scratch if needed. I discuss this Bootstrapping Problem, and how to avoid it.

Brett Weir, Jun 5, 2023, 7 mins

Loading config files in Python

Application configuration isn't the most exciting part of your stack, but it's surprisingly hard to get right. I present a recipe for loading config files

Brett Weir, May 29, 2023, 8 mins

Six reasons to start a business

If you've ever wondered if starting a business was right for you, here are some reasons, taken from my own experiences, that you may not have thought of.

Brett Weir, May 22, 2023, 5 mins

What is Terraform?

Terraform is all the rage nowadays, but what is it exactly? And what problems does it solve? Let's dive in to the exciting world of infrastructure automation.

Brett Weir, May 15, 2023, 14 mins

Confessions of a document generator

A tale of how easily a project can be derailed by attempting to automate things that maybe don't need to be automated.

Brett Weir, May 1, 2023, 5 mins

Building a static site with Eleventy and Tailwind

Eleventy and Tailwind are two popular tools for front end development, but making them work together is non-obvious. We'll explore these tools for the first time and work on getting them to play nicely together.

Brett WeirClaire Nguyen, Apr 17, 2023, 12 mins