Amazon Athena SQL Cheat Sheet
A practical Amazon Athena SQL cheat sheet: partition projection, CTAS, JSON, window functions, and the cost and quoting gotchas that bite in Trino engine v3.
Vibe-coding AnalyseMy.Golf: a series
Over twenty years of intermittent effort — from VBA macros and an Access database built for The Cygnet Golf Society in 2002, through two abandoned Laravel attempts, to a full Laravel 13 SaaS using Claude Code throughout. This is the series index.
AI Terminology Demystified: Agents, MCPs, and Skills – How They Fit Together
Agent, MCP, skill, tool — everyone in the AI space throws these terms around, but they’re not the same thing. This glossary cuts through the confusion, defines each concept clearly, and shows exactly how they wire together in a real-world AI architecture.
Adding and extending storage on Linux
How to add a new disk and extend existing storage on Linux using LVM — covering physical servers, VMware virtual machines, and AWS EC2 EBS volumes, with a full command reference.
Setting up MySQL replication in Docker and Multipass test environments
How to extend a single-instance MySQL test environment to a primary with two replicas using Docker or Multipass, covering GTID-based replication configuration and two approaches to seeding replica data: mysqldump and data directory snapshot.
Dissecting a running Linux instance to build a Packer configuration
How to extract packages, services, users, and filesystem configuration from a running Linux instance and use it as the basis for a repeatable Packer AMI template.
Docker and Multipass MySQL test environments for upgrade and tuning practice
How to build a disposable MySQL test environment using Docker or Multipass, load it with realistic datasets at three scales (sakila, employees, IMDb), and use it for version upgrade and performance tuning practice.
Command pipelines in Bash: chaining commands and handling errors
How to chain commands with Bash pipes, why the default error-handling behaviour is dangerous, and how to fix it with pipefail, PIPESTATUS, and a defensive script header.
Deriving unique server IDs from IP addresses
AWK scripts for converting between IP addresses and decimal numbers – and why this makes a reliable source of unique server IDs for MySQL replication clusters and other distributed systems.
Case study: Modernising an AWS estate with Claude Code
Modernising a production AWS estate with Claude Code – migrating Terraform state v3 to v4, the AWS provider to 6.0, and Amazon Linux, PHP and WordPress to current versions – with an honest account of where the AI tool helped and where it did not.