All Articles

22 articles about infrastructure, cloud, and engineering

The Golang Zero Value Trap: How pgx v5 Exposed Silent Corruption

Exploring a subtle bug in Golang's pgx v5 library that led to silent data corruption due to zero values. This post delves into the issue, its implications, and how to avoid similar pitfalls in your Go applications.

January 2, 2026

Stop Guessing, Start Tracing: Pinpointing Service Bottlenecks with OpenTelemetry

Diagnosing performance issues in software can often feel more like detective work than engineering. In this post, we explore how tracing with OpenTelemetry helped us identify and resolve a critical bottleneck in our service, transforming our approach to observability and performance optimization.

May 27, 2025

Terraform In Production, Lessons Learned

Terraform has a lot of power, but often even heavy users of terraform miss some of the simple things that can make managing infrastructure easier than vendor...

September 22, 2017

Deploying To A VPS Without The Hassle

It's a question that gets asked with quite a lot of answers, Docker, Ansible, CodeDeploy, Chef, the list goes on. The idea should be simple, taking code from...

September 10, 2017

Cross Account AWS Lambda Deployments

I recently talked at the Serverless London meetup https://www.meetup.com/Serverless London/events/236664340/ , I was asked about how we do cross AWS account...

February 7, 2017

What Am I Copy And Pasting Into My Dockerfile

It's pretty common that when you have no idea what you are doing, you want things to "just work". Docker, and by extension, Linux, have a world of documentat...

December 27, 2016

Go Microservices Without Docker....say Whaaaaaat

Docker is pretty cool, lots of tools, big community and it goes quite nicely with Golang Go microservices. My company, FundApps, is a Fintec startup, we writ...

November 10, 2016

Deploying Go Microservices With AWS CodeDeploy

We have a familiar story at FundApps https://www.fundapps.co/ , big monolith, trying to break into microservices, same old same old. We have a dotnet stack,...

November 8, 2016

Cloudformation Updates, What's Happened Since You Started Using Terraform

CloudFormation, the AWS specific infrastructure as code service, I don't use it anymore....but maybe I should. Maybe you should too.

October 9, 2016

Consul And Service Discovery, How It Can Help

Consul https://www.consul.io/ is a tool I've been using the last few months to get a handle on our expanding platform. Consul is a tool built by Hashicorp to...

September 11, 2016

Lambda Deploys With Apex

AWS Lambda https://aws.amazon.com/Lambda/details/ has been around for a couple of years, in that time the way in which you create and deploy functions has be...

September 4, 2016

How To ELB With ALB

Amazon recently announced its new load balancer, the Application Load Balancer ALB https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new aws application load balancer/ . This...

August 28, 2016

A Month With No Job

Sixteen days ago, I quit my job.

February 2, 2016

Creating An Alarm Service Using AWS Lambda And Slack

Lambda http://aws.amazon.com/lambda/ by Amazon http://aws.amazon.com/ was a service launched last year and was in preview until a few weeks ago https://aws.a...

May 2, 2015

Real Time Gatling Results With Docker And Influxdb

Gatling http://gatling.io/ is an open source, Scala based load testing tool. It offers a simple proxy based web recorder for following user journeys, or alte...

February 22, 2015

Quick Uptime Tests

We had a huge bug on the live site, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news http://www.bbc.co.uk/arabic , the navigation for our Asia edition was broken. Most of the links...

December 23, 2014

Proxy Auth In Phantomjs

I recently setup a Nginx proxy server on a UK based provider, this is to test UK centric features of the BBC News website. We use AWS for most of our tooling...

May 27, 2014

Screen Recording In Android

Sometimes you need to show someone something on a phone, words are just not good enough. With testing moving more to mobile, having the ability to show a col...

November 26, 2013

Game Client Web Browsers

I recently got Battlefield 4, an intensive first person shooter with high detail graphics and enough shooting to satisfy any teenage angst. I purchased the g...

November 10, 2013

Wraith Opensource

Today we are announcing the release of a front end regression testing tool called Wraith .  This tool is something we have been using for the last 6 mon...

July 30, 2013

Mobile Network Traffic Inspection

In this post, i will talk about how to view network traffic and the HAR HTTP Archive file. This is useful for doing several things, my initial intention was...

November 15, 2012

Responsive Testing

We thought we'd share some information on our testing process. & 13;

March 28, 2012