Last week, I ran into this tweet: the tweet It kinda triggered me. Why would someone pay $0.40 per secret per month when you could just use AWS Parameter Store and store them as SecureStrings FOR FREE? That’s what I use for oneiras.com, so I was determined to find out if I’d missed something. Am I unknowingly paying per secret? Or is there actually a reason to use AWS Secrets Manager instead? Turns out, there are a couple, but only if you really need them. The Big One: Automated Secrets...

Someone pushes a new feature to prod the same day you go on-call. Hours later, your phone goes off - not a gentle buzz, but a full-blown siren that could wake up the entire neighborhood. You open the alert, and it’s for a feature you didn’t even touch. Maybe it’s unhandled NPEs, maybe something else. Doesn’t matter. You’re the one on-call, so it’s your problem now. When Things Break In those moments, it’s usually faster to just debug and fix it - even without full context. I’m pretty good at...

About eight years ago, when I was still a QA, Microsoft Azure “lost” our primary database. Without it, we were basically out of business - it was the main source of truth for, well, almost everything. I don’t remember exactly what the database held anymore, but I do remember the chaos that day. And the stress. A lot of it. Today, I saw a tweet about how the Korean government had all its data in a single location, with no backups. It reminded me: we all know this lesson, but we keep relearning...